Sagan (Planetary Walk) and (Rod) Serling #AtoZChallenge

I never wrote an "S" post for the Blogging from A to Z Challenge in advance, feeling it would be So Simple.

It wasn't.

"S" is one of these deceptive letters. I was going to blog about the city of Skaneateles, located near Syracuse, a lovely small resort town along a Stunning finger lake, but I realized I have blogged about it so many times, I just couldn't. Not today.  (I still may, although I am running out of days.)

Then, I thought about two people who lived in New York State for part of their lives, and influenced the lives of many, many people.  I've Surprised myself by picking a theme that's just a little Special.

One of these people was an astronomer and astrophysicist, born in Brooklyn, famous in Ithaca for what he did in his time there while teaching at Cornell, and the author or co-author of some 20 books:  Carl Sagan. During his life, Sagan was sometimes so controversial that police had to guard his home in Ithaca.  People would also steal his vanity license plate because it was so distinctive.

One of Sagan's students at Cornell was Bill Nye, the Science Guy, whom I had the pleasure of seeing in action once in Ithaca, but that's a story for another day.

Sagan helped to found a science museum in Ithaca that my son spent many happy hours in.  Today, I want to show you something else.

Let's take a walk in Carl Sagan's honor among the planets.  

The walk starts in the Ithaca commons.  This is a one to five billion scale walk, meaning each monument to a planet is, scale-wise, proportionally the distance from one planet to the other. 

Venus.

Our own planet Earth.

Mars.

For the rest, you'll have to use your imagination.  I did take the entire walk once, some years ago - it ends at the Sciencecenter, the museum that Carl Sagan helped to found, with a tiny Pluto (this walk was created before Pluto was demoted from planet status).

As for Rod Serling:  He is well known for the TV Series the Twilight Zone (which started to air in 1959, meaning that Show has been part of our imaginations for many years), but was so much more.  I blogged more about him in 2009, when Binghamton celebrated the 50th anniversary of this iconic show.  I took the tour Binghamton put on, and was humbled by people who literally traveled from all over the world to visit Binghamton.   I'll simply provide a link to that post below, and, no, I'm not going to say "Submitted for your approval".

I hope you will take the time to read about the real Rod Serling, though, on this "S" day in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.  My theme:  New York State.

The Writer Once Without Honor