A Tale of Arcturus and Algol (Chicago Fair 1933)

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Chicago Fair 27 May 1933, 10h55am Chicago

Arcturus dominates the high western sky after dark. Spot the Big Dipper off to its right, in the northwest

In astronomy lore today, Arcturus may be best known for its cosmic history: It's a Population II orange giant some 7 billion years old, older than the solar system, racing by our part of space on a trajectory that indicates it came from another galaxy: a dwarf galaxy that fell into the Milky Way and merged with it.

But in the astronomy books of our grandparents, Arcturus had a different claim to fame: It turned on the lights of the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago, celebrating "a century of progress." Astronomers rigged the newly invented photocell to the eye end of big telescopes around the US and aimed the scopes where Arcturus would pass at the correct moment on opening night. In places where the sky was clear the star's light crept onto the photocells, the weak signals were amplified and sent over telegraph wires to Chicago, a switch was tripped, and on blazed the massive lights to the cheers of tens of thousands.

Why Arcturus? Astronomers of the time thought its was 40 light-years away (modern value: 36.7 ±0.2 light-years). So the light would have been in flight since the previous such great event in Chicago, the World's Columbian Exhibition in 1893.

And earlier? Arcturus was known as the first of the familiar nighttime stars to be seen in the daytime with a telescope: by Jean-Baptiste Morin in 1635.
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-n ... uly-22-30/

The Chicago Sun Times reports that at five minutes to 11 the motorcycle escort came down the ramp onto the field and the bombs were thrown up in a dense barrage to announce the arrival of Postmaster General James A. Farley. Here began the spectacle that had been lacking when the first 50-cent customer registered No. 1 on the turnstile to open the exposition.??? (See chart above)
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/5/27/ ... pening-day
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While the astronomers were celebrating the view of Arcturus, the chart shows Algol at the Midheaven widely squaring Saturn in the 6th and semi-square the Moon . And Regulus rising.

Most people don’t know that 40 years later, the 1933 Century of Progress, the next World’s Fair in Chicago, had its own actual killer, far more deadly than Holmes. In the summer and fall of 1933 an outbreak of illness at the Century of Progress sickened, at a minimum, 1,400 people, with 98 resultant known deaths.
By mid-August, 1933, health authorities had identified the disease as amoebic dysentery. The story of solving the mystery of this epidemic is a remarkable one. In fact, it’s really two stories: that of medical investigators determining the cause of the disease, and that of engineers tracking down the infrastructure problem that allowed the disease to spread.

Because of the time of day, “heavy discharge from the gravity sewer systems of buildings??? and from fixtures in the Congress Plaza would be expected. “This would place sewer no 2 of [the Congress Plaza] under pressure, even without a storm. This, coupled with the simultaneous flooding of the street sewer by the storm, probably caused serious leakage from the branch sewer over the drinking-water tank around the wooden plug.??? Later tests proved that the likely leakage from the pipe over the drinking water tank during and after the storm was “about two-tenths of a gallon per minute.??? The report states that during the very heavy rainfall of 47 minutes, “the amount of freshly infected sewage water which could have drained into the cooled-water tank at [the Congress Plaza] . . . would have been 9.4 gallons.??? Further, “owing to the probable heavy use of this cooled water at mealtime a large percentage of this contaminated water might have been consumed during that evening.
https://www.edmcdevitt.org/the-plague-a ... n%20deaths.

Algol is equally famed for the "Algol paradox." Algol is a close double star. The two stars are so close together, separated by only five percent the distance between the Earth and the Sun, that the brighter smaller star produces tides in the larger one. Matter then flows in from the large one (at a rate of around two hundred- millionths of a solar mass per year) to the small bright one, the effect directly observed through the stellar spectrum as the K giant is being stripped nearly to its core.

Algol - Leakage from one building to another. As above, so below.
Blessings!

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Thank you Deborah and Archi.

In the chart of the opening we see Regulus conjunct the ASC trine Uranus in Aries in the 8th which may have accounted for private investment in new technologies for the event.
The more I see Regulus, the more I start to believe that the regal power it is associated with is only ephemeral and transient.
Blessings!