February 17, 2008
Kilmacduagh Tower and Stars
The Brightest Star - The International Space Station [ISS] and the Space Shuttle flying over the Kilmacduagh holy site in Galway on a cold, starry moonlight night last week. I took a picture of the ISS last June when it flew over Salthill.
Camera= Canon 40D, lens = Sigma 10-20mm@10mm, aperture = f9, speed = 30 sec, ISO800.
In the twelfth century, the monks of the monastery at Kilmacduagh (founded by St. Colman in 632) decided to build a bell tower. Apart from summoning the monks to prayer, it would have been useful as a watch-tower too - Kilmacduagh had been attacked in the past by Vikings. Around the same time, the good friars in Pisa in Tuscany decided to build a bell tower too. They decided to throw a bit of money at the project, and go for something a bit fancy.
Well, the two towers ended up with one thing in common - a distinct slant. The Leaning tower of Pisa famously leaned from the start, whereas the Kilmacduagh tower began its leaning more recently [at least I assume so, since descriptions of the tower in old texts make no mention of the slant.]
Kilmacduagh was once a distinct diocese [it is now part of the Galway diocese], complete with Bishop and Cathedral, and such, the site would have been seen as a prosperous place (which made it a target for looters).
Throwing money [and almost unimaginable amounts of it, at that] at the problem is also a key part of space travel. During the week before last, the Space Shuttle Atlantis was launched to deliver a new module to the International Space Station [ISS]. Launching a Shuttle costs 450 million dollars a shot, and the ISS is budgeted to cost 100 billion euro over the lifetime of the project. The European Space Agency [ESA] contribute 8 billion euro and ESA likes to rationalise this cost by pointing out that 8 billion euro might seem a lot of money but it's only the cost of a cup of coffee per European per year. Such sums would have been unimaginable to the monks toiling away in spiritual pursuits in Kilmacduagh, but then, could they have imagined that the combined wealth of the Irish would one day surpass one trillion euro, as it did last week ?
For all of last week, the brightest star in the sky was, briefly, one that we built ourselves - the reflected light from the ISS and the Shuttle as they flew, docked together, over Ireland. This morning, the Space Shuttle departed from the ISS and will return to Earth on Wednesday. Who knows how long the ISS will endure in space - the tower in Kilmacduagh - the tallest round tower in Ireland - has endured for nearly nine hundred years already.
ISS, shuttle, pisa, tower, round,gort, kilmacduagh, ireland, westmeath, irishblogs, photoblogs, photography, photographs, pictures, galwayblogs, blog, monasset, north atlantic skyline, john smyth, Canon, 40D, february, 2008
Posted by monasset at February 17, 2008 07:29 PM