JYOTISH

Aradhana Choudhuri

we have been counting dragonssince the moon bled over Ugarit
all the harmonics of base eighteen (and a half, plus or minus)
in Loughcrew and the Honshu and the Vedanga Jyotish.

we are the descendants of those 
who measured the dragontime

we hurl yantras of metal and glass at the heavens
on falconwings: SOHO, NEOSSAT

we are stationkeepers; we look for omens of the apocalypse:
is the sun angry today?
Aten and Atira in
the streaks of light as the stars stand still

we reclaim our Saros, our deep-count, our stone-engraved
to calibrate
Earth's undulations across
the epochs,
the ephemerides
as the moon retreats, 
the last eclipse the earth will ever see
563 million years from now
when the Sun eats the dragon over Ugarit

The Science

Ancient eclipse records, carved into clay tablets in Babylon, inscribed on oracle bones in China, encoded in the Vedanga Jyotish, are not historical curiosities. They are active scientific data. NASA and other space agencies use these observations, some dating back to 720 BCE, to refine models of Earth's rotational deceleration and the Moon's orbital recession. Without the Babylonian scribes who documented the eclipse over Ugarit, our ephemerides would drift, our satellites would miss their targets. Satellite stationkeeping is a key part of the work that I do - my teams use data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) to predict space weather that could disrupt spacecraft operations, and I also worked on the Near Earth Object Space Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSAT) that looks for asteroids that could pose a threat to life on Earth. For those of us that build and operate science satellites, our daily work involves the same fundamental task as the priest-astronomers of Loughcrew and the Vedanga Jyotish scholars: watching the sky and the Earth for omens that matter. The tools have changed—radio telescopes instead of stone circles, SQL databases instead of Cuneiform. But we still calibrate our models against the deep count of those who came before us. The infinity is twofold: the poem spans time from 720 BCE to 563 million years in the future, when the moon will have retreated far enough from the Earth that total eclipses become geometrically impossible, and the lineage of sky-watchers has no beginning we can find and no end we can see. We are stationkeepers, all of us, maintaining humanity's oldest continuous scientific project: measuring the heavens.

The Poet

Aradhana Choudhuri (she/her) is an aerospace engineer, physicist, and poet based in Ottawa, Canada. She writes at the intersection of South-Asian feminism and the natural sciences. Her poetry has appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine.

Next poem: Perspective by Carol Hart