Hint: it's very small, it has a tiny antenna, it flies, it hums, and it drinks flowers.
I was in Berkeley this morning and visited Jupiter, which is a beer house downtown. I was on my way to visit and maybe photograph a big construction project next to UC Berkeley. There's a towering yellow construction crane just uphill from Jupiter and the California Theater, maybe the tallest crane downtown Berkeley has seen in 100 years. It's almost as big as the stage the Rolling Stones built for their Oakland Coliseum concert. Anyway, if you pass through Jupiter, you actually get a gravity assist going uphill. That's because you save a couple of minutes cutting the corner at the end of the block.
Jupiter has a satellite model overhead. I'm not sure the diners and drinkers there ever notice it. The satellite is attached to a wall covered with ivy, in case you ever visit the Jovian body. Some people say I have a Jovian body. It's something to be grateful for, probably. I'm not sure I trust people with a Mercury body, and I can't see how Pluto body people make it through the day. They probably sleep a lot under thick blankets.
Jupiter's satellite reminds me of Sputnik, the tiny spacecraft launched by Russia when it was the old Soviet Union. We just had the anniversary of Sputnik's launch in 1957, October 5th. That was the first time anybody had put an object into earth orbit. That achievement ushered in the Space Age. It shocked the United States, which hadn't seen it coming. We had won the Second World War with the atomic bomb, but Sputnik was beyond our reach. It flew silently above the United States and the world, it crossed national borders without permission, and it transmitted its beep-beep radio signal for all to hear. Sputnik was an extraordinary shock.
Accepting the challenge, the United States answered the Soviet Union/Russia with our own satellite, Explorer. We followed that with the Vanguard satellite. Next, emboldened by our success at matching the Russians, NASA successfully launched a Maytag washer/dryer. A year later, we put a Volkswagen Beetle into low orbit. The Beetle came down after a month when the low orbit decayed and it splashed down off the coast of Jamaica. Funny thing about that Beetle, it floated on the ocean until the USS Hornet picked it up. If only Gus Grissom had flown a Beetle.
Anyway, visitors can see part of the big construction crane from the open patio behind Jupiter, so when I looked up at the crane, I saw the Jupiter satellite nearby. As if on cue, a hummingbird flew into the area over Jupiter, and then it took a rest break on the satellite's antenna. A nice moment. The hummingbird left Jupiter an instant after I got a single photograph, and so did I.
Click on the photo for a larger view of it, but not much larger, it's a hummingbird.
