It is but a small step from yesterday's Weather Eye on Galileo to Damon Albarn and the rock group, Blur. A year or two ago, Blur's album, Parklife, had a track called Far Out that provided an extensive litany of other-worldly satellites:
I spy in the night sky, don't I,
Phoebe, Io, Elara, Leda, Callisto, Sinope,
Janus, Dione, Portia, so many moons,
Quiet in the sky at night, hot in the Milky Way.
Io and Calista are two of the four moons of Jupiter that Galileo discovered through his telescope. But perhaps even more importantly, and maybe sadly, Galileo demythologised Blur's last line, which talks about the Milky Way. He identified this luminous band as the fused light of countless stars, too small and close together to be distinguished individually.
Other cultures, however, had a different concept of the Milky Way. Pythagoras, for example, was of the view that the sun had once "run out of its pathway", and that the Milky Way was, as it were, the "scorch mark" it left in its wake. Theophrastus, on the other hand, declared that it was the joining together or "seam" of the two halves of the celestial globe.
But the most popular explanation in centuries gone by was that the Milky Way was the highway across the heavens to the great palace of Jupiter. The story goes that towards the end of the so-called Golden Age, Jupiter, the chief god, was greatly distressed at the depraved state of humanity. He was so angry that he summoned all the gods to council, and the road they took to his palace can still be seen to stretch across the darkened sky.
It was, in fact, a quite decisive meeting: it was resolved that the Earth should be destroyed. Jupiter, accordingly, took up his thunderbolt, and was about to launch it on the unsuspecting world when it occurred to him that such a major conflagration might well set fire to heaven, too, so he sent a flood instead. And enter Noah, I suppose!
It is to this Jovian theory of the Milky Way that Marlowe refers in Hero and Leander. Hero, if you remember, was a priestess of the goddess Venus, and fell wildly in love with young Leander who, nightly and bravely, swam across the Hellespont to meet her. But one sad night Leander drowned as he tried to keep their tryst, and the tears from Hero's eyes were like:
. . . a stream of liquid pearle, which down her face,
Made milk-white paths whereon the gods might trace
Their way to Jove's high court.