Sometimes you travel a long way to see more than rain. Best bring an umbrella because the destination should be better than the journey.
Our friends brought us to the Fushimi Inari Shrine which was a highlight of our trip to Kyoto. These vermilion torii gates that lead to the sacred Mount Inari are an impressive part of an elegant series of shrines dedicated to Inari, god of rice. They say this shrine was already built before Kyoto became the capital twelve hundred years ago. Then in 1868, the Emperor decided to move to Edo now known as Tokyo.
I doubt it was the rain that drove him away to sunnier climes. By coincidence, the search and study of the sun featured in science that year too.
That was also the year that helium was discovered and named for the sun god Helios after Pierre Janssen had worked out how to study the sun without an eclipse. Both Janssen and Norman Lockyer were independently observing the spectral lines from the chromosphere of the sun. Both noted a bright yellow line neither could explain. Since this was the first observation of this particular spectral line, they each proposed that it was an element not yet known on earth. Helium was thus the first element that had ever been detected in space before being found on Earth.
All images © Simon Robinson October 15, 2017.
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