From Flowers To Photons: From The Ground Up A Talk In Memory Of Janet

Abstract

Although I didn’t meet Janet until the last year of her life, we immediately became good friends-not so much for her love of astronomy but for her almost equal passion for flowers. As David showed her our observatory complex, I shared her amazement as she stoped over and over again to admire the diversity of natural flowers in our desert home, and she told me of her interest in doing a Project-some day-relating her two loves of flowers and the universe. In her honor, I offer a look at the amazing coincidences that atoms and Nature can come up with- a dandelion on Earth and Scorpius in the sky, a flower blooming for only a day to remind us of long-gone nova in Messier 80, and other tiny flower designs that mimic some of the vast structures of distant galaxies.