Monster from the Red Planet
QUESTION What is the largest mountain in the solar system? WHEN calculating mountains in the solar system, heights are given from base to peak because there is no equivalent to height above sea level on other worlds.
Using these parameters, Mauna Kea in Hawaii is the Earth’s highest mountain. While it has an altitude of only 4.2 kilometres, which is much lower than Mount Everest’s 8.9km, most of the mountain is under water.
If you measure it from its base, it is 10km high, which makes it the eighth highest mountain in the solar system.
The highest and largest planetary mountain is on Mars. Olympus Mons, which dominates the Martian landscape, is generally calculated to be 22km high, but limitations in the accuracy of the measurements and the lack of a precise definition of its base mean some claim it is more than 24km high.
It is also massive, covering 311,000 square kilometres, which is approximately the size of Italy.
Olympus Mons is the result of thousands of basaltic lava flows that poured from volcanic vents over a long period.
A volcano’s caldera or crater is a reflection of the size of the underlying magma chamber.
Olympus Mons’s caldera has a depth of 32.2km.
Another claimant to the title of the solar system’s highest mountain is Rheasilvia on Vesta, the second largest asteroid that orbits the Sun.
It is 505km in diameter and makes up 90% of the asteroid’s surface, protruding 22.9km.
It is named after Rhea Silvia, mythological mother of Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome. James Budgeon, Oxford. QUESTION There was once a serial on RTÉ Radio called The Kennedys Of Castleross. Who played the characters Aunt Bridget and her son James? THE Kennedys of Castleross was the first soap opera to air on Irish radio. It began on Radio Éireann, the forerunner of RTÉ, in April 1955 and it survived until 1973.
The programme was sponsored by Fry-Cadbury and the 15-minute programme went out twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 1pm. It was set in a small midlands town, with the fictional name of Castleross, and it was centred around Mrs Kennedy’s grocery shop in Kevin Street.
Mrs Kennedy was played by Marie Kean, a character actor who was born in Rush, Co. Dublin, in 1918 and who died in Dublin in 1973. In 1948 she joined the Radio Éireann Players before eventually moving on to the Abbey Theatre. In later life, she lived for a long time in London and featured in plays and films as well as appearing with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Marie Kean was the only actor who appeared in every episode of The Kennedys Of Castleross and was paid two guineas an episode (about €2.67 in today’s money). The show had a cast of 14, but budgetary restrictions meant that only three of the cast could appear in each episode. The advertising agency that had organised the programme was notoriously parsimonious towards the writers and actors it employed.
The show’s signature tune was A Fair Day by Hamilton Harty. Initially the series was written by its creator, an American scriptwriter called Mark Grantham. Later the scripts were written by other writers, including Hugh Leonard and David Hanly, who later found fame on the Morning Ireland programme on RTÉ Radio 1.
Hugh Leonard in particular loved dropping outrageous and often very rude asides into his scripts. The actors, reading the scripts sight unseen, would come to these quips in the script and collapse laughing, so the recording had to start all over again.
Actors who later became household names, such as TP McKenna and Norman Rodway, appeared in the series.
Aunt Bridget was played by Pauline Delaney. Born in Dublin in 1925, she died in London in 2007. Her first husband was Norman Rodway. While she played Aunt Bridget, it’s not possible to ascertain who played her son James.
Radio Review, a forerunner of the RTÉ Guide, didn’t carry a cast list and its listing of the show was so terse that it merely said ‘1pm, Fry-Cadbury’ and didn’t even give the name of the serial.
RTÉ Archives says it doesn’t have the full cast list, so between these sources it’s impossible to find out who played young James. The only concession made by Radio Review to the serial was to print a map of the make-believe town of Castleross.
During the 1950s and 1960s, the serial was hugely popular and much of the country came to a stop twice a week at 1pm to tune in. But when the show ended in 1973, The Irish Times got just one letter of complaint! Ellie Kelly, Beaumont, Dublin 9. QUESTION Did Mozart steal the music to Allegri’s Miserere? THE word ‘steal’ is too harsh. Mozart never resorted to Handel’s dubious practice of ‘borrowing’ freely from the compositions of other masters.
Miserere mei Deus (Have Mercy Upon Me, O God), a setting from the 1630s of Psalm 51 by Catholic priest Gregorio Allegri, was written to be performed exclusively in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel during Holy Week.
Consisting of repeated alternate verses of plainsong and relatively simple four-part harmony (a style called falso-bordone), the famous story of Mozart using his analytical memory to write down the music is not hard to believe. Aged 14 in 1770, he listened to the performance on Wednesday, returned on Friday and, after making minor corrections, wrote it down. He later passed a copy to the music historian and traveller Dr Charles Burney, who published it in 1771 in London, but without the ornamentations, which were a jealously guarded secret of the singers.
The young Mozart wrote his own setting of the Miserere, K85, later on, in 1770 in Bologna, modelled on Allegri’s work, but without the intervening verses.
The score was autographed in his father Leopold Mozart’s hand and it is assumed the work was left unfinished by his son and later completed by the German composer Johann Anton Andre, who published many of Mozart’s works.
There is evidence that copies of Allegri’s work had been circulating in Europe before 1770 and that Mozart may have heard it performed in London in 1764.
Today’s version includes a top C, which is due to a copyist’s error in 1880. Interestingly, Alessandro Moreschi, the ‘last castrato’ (18581922), was a member of the Sistine Chapel Choir that performed Allegri’s celebrated work. E. Felix Schoendorfer, Stoke Poges, Bucks.
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