Springtime Equals a Party at Observatory

Sunday will spin one of those natural, balanced, inexorable cycles that surely created the springs at Vergeze and Perrier.

Venus, Jupiter and a crescent moon are clustered. There will be 12 hours of darkness and 12 hours of daylight and not one tick more. Or less. At 40 seconds past 1:39 a.m. the sun will cross the celestial Equator and align with the tips of ancient temples and unknown rites.

And spring will be here.

Rebirth. The vernal (spring) equinox (equal night). In Vermont and Quebec, as if by some empyreal nod, maple sap trickles toward sugarhouses. Grizzlies are grumpy but awake. Farmers will start sowing Europe from the Hague to Odessa. Frogs lay eggs and geese fly poleward and primroses struggle from British hedgerows.

On a somewhat less congenital level, the Griffith Observatory will throw its annual Star Party.

The Los Angeles Astronomical Society will set up telescopes on the observatory’s front lawn. The public is invited to gaze along. The observatory’s 12-inch Zeiss refracting telescope will be available for viewing. So will Jupiter, Venus, the sun and the moon.

“It will be a glorious sight,” enthused John Mosley, program supervisor at the observatory.

It also will be an opportunity to witness the end of time.

“True,” Mosley said. “We’re talking about the end of the world as we know it. It is going to change, and the changes are going to make it impossible for life to exist.”

That dire inevitability is the topic of “The End of Time,” a new planetarium show that will be presented as part of Star Party and play through July.

The problems, simply stated, are these: The Earth is wobbling on its axis. At the same time, the Earth is slowing down and days are becoming measurably longer. And the moon is moving away.

“The net effect, eventually, is to make the day as long as the month and that will be 55 times as long as the present day,” Mosley explained. “When you have 27 days of sunlight and 27 days of darkness, the temperatures are going to get extreme . . . it will go way below freezing, and I assume that it would get up to or above boiling.”

The wobble, he said, is basically a closed loop whereby the movement will never become a wild tumble. On the other hand, the ellipticity of the Earth’s orbit varies. So does the amount of tilt to the Earth’s polar spindle.

“These three cycles conspire to change the distribution of the amount of heat that a latitude of the Earth gets during the course of the year,” Mosley said.

And therein lies the birth of the next Ice Age.

“What is going to happen is that there will be a large ice sheet develop in North America and Europe and Asia,” he said. “In our latitude it will get very wet. The dry lake beds, like Edwards Air Force Base, will become lakes again.”

It also might produce two lumps in San Francisco Bay. Alcatraz and one enormous iceberg.

But before we start packing our bags (if you can figure where on Earth, as it were, one goes when the world is at the point of kaplooie), it might be comforting to consider the timetable.

The next Ice Age, Mosley said, shouldn’t dawn for another 30,000 years.

That elongated day of 55 days should not occur until 6 billion years from now.

Long before that--maybe 1 billion years before that--the sun will have burned out anyway.

And prior to any of this, there must be consideration of man’s own damage to his world, to his crops, health and climate by accelerating chemical usage that is depleting the Earth’s protective ozone layer.

“I see a lot of options,” said Mosley. “One possibility is a nuclear war that knocks us back to the Stone Age, followed by an inability to mine any raw materials, because all of the raw materials you can scoop out of the ground are (by then) long gone.

“So survivors (of nuclear war) won’t be able to do what the Indians of Northern Michigan could do, which is to pick up copper out of the ground.”

No metals, no ages of bronze and iron and no redevelopment of man.

“I think that is one interesting scenario,” Mosley said.

I think it beats worrying about earthquakes and the Big One.

Star Party at Griffith Observatory, 2800 E . Observatory Road, Griffith Park, Los Angeles, 1 p.m. to 10 p.m., Sunday. Admission free. Call (213) 664-1191.