“A speck of stardust just settled in my eye…” A bit of yer actual real
Stardust, yesterday. Not quite as glamorous as one would have hoped.
The stardust trail leading back to you…
A recent article, published in the journal Science, about the existence of stardust in Earth’s upper atmosphere, has been picked up by the world’s press. Here’s an edited extract from one of the reports printed in last Friday’s Times:
THE magic ingredient which helped make Hoagy Carmichael?s song Stardust so popular, gave David Bowie his alter-ego Ziggy Stardust and inspired Woody Allen?s film Stardust Memories, has been tracked down. Scientist’s findings confirm that star quality is indeed the rarest of things: of more than 100,000 particles collected from the upper atmosphere, just six are true stardust, from beyond the solar system.
If you look closely, you may notice an uncanny resemblance between the stardust on the lettering of Ziggy’s Stardust (below) from the original The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars album cover and the real stardust (above).
Obviously any inter-galactic traveller worth their salt, would have access to any quantity of the stuff… which explains the abundance of it on the aforementioned lettering.
Note the presence of real STARDUST that appears on David Bowie’s 30-year-old album, Ziggy Stardust.
It seems that, (despite a clean up of the typeface on some reissues, where the accurate portrayal of stardust was replaced with wholly inaccurate star shapes) The Man Who Fell To Earth had first hand experience of the stuff all along. But then again we all knew that, didn’t we?
Thanx to the appropriately named Spaceface, who pointed me in the direction of the