Hello everyone,
I’m really impressed at how the 21st Street Mission’s calendar has been pinned down, and that
@Ar-Pharazon was able to spot it straight away. The screencap
@Maurice posted is the clearest I’ve ever seen of it. I hope you don’t mind if I use it to illustrate a corrected version of my own thoughts about this story? It’s a shame it doesn’t help with dating, but as a behind the scenes production detail I find it (to coin a phrase) “fascinating.”
Thanks to
@Timo ’s suggestion, I’ve spent the weekend playing around with the
Starry Night astronomy software (really good and very easy to use, but you do have to buy it, I’m afraid). I’ll try and keep this as short as possible, hopefully not to the point it makes no sense, though. The “far left star in Orion’s Belt” is Alnitak. At least to an observer in New York about 1930, it would be in the sky every day (although you wouldn’t always be able to see it), in the southern half of the sky. It would appear over the horizon to the east, spend six hours rising in the sky until it was just about directly due south and about halfway up the sky (
Starry Night says about 47 degrees above the horizon). It then travels slowly to the west and goes back under the horizon about twelve hours after it first appeared.
To start, I found the day in 1930 when Alnitak would be at its highest point at nine at night. It’s the 13th February. I don’t think that’s enough to absolutely pin down the date, but it does make my earlier suggestion that it might be November look extremely unlikely. On 1st November, Alnitak won’t be over the horizon until about ten at night, and at its highest until around four the next morning.
I think having the stargazing happen earlier than mid-February is unlikely (the weather!), but it can’t be all that much later. By 1st May, Alnitak rises at around ten in the morning, is at its highest at four in the afternoon and sets about ten at night. I think it must be earlier in the year than that.
My own best guess is that it’s around the middle of March. Alnitak was highest in the sky at around seven in the evening on March 16th, when
Starry Night says it was still too light to see it. By half-past eight it was dark. Alnitak was still about 40 degrees above the horizon, and would be almost directly south-west to anyone looking at it from New York. That means that if Jim and Edith are walking along one of the north-south avenues of the city, Orion (assuming they can see it at all) would be hanging in the sky directly ahead of them. This is by no means the only interpretation you could make, but I think it’s the one I’m least unhappy with.
Rather than make a long post even longer, I’ll just say that my previous weather information has been from these two sites:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets/GHCND/stations/GHCND:USW00094728/detail
for the day-to-day temperatures and
https://www.climatestations.com/new-york-city-2/
for some graphs that indicate temperatures, whether it’s raining or snowing, and if there’s snow on the ground.
@JonnyQuest037, how much weight (if any) you want to attach to my suggestions is of course entirely up to you. I’m having a lot of fun reading the thread, and digging all of this up. Thanks for posing the question!
Best wishes,
Timon
