Category Archives: stargazing

aliens, stargazing, venus

A Grand Time

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Another Blogging Milestone

The other day I made my one-thousandth post to this blog.  I didn’t know this milestone had passed until I logged in today and the helpful counter in the administrative area told me so. What a milestone to achieve with my post about Jupiter and its latest impact!  I’m grateful to all my readers who keep coming back. You’re why I write this stuff about the universe!

So, here in post 1,002, what should I write about?  Stargazing is always a good topic.  There’s nothing like a stroll under the night-time sky to inspire one’s thoughts toward cosmic ideas. We’ve been going out every night to watch the sunset and see who can spot Venus first.  It’s there, if you know where to look, and once the skies start to get kinda, sorta dark, the planet is blazing out like a beacon. The good thing about Venus is that you only need clear skies to see it because it’s bright in city skies as well as in the dark countryside. So, I encourage you to check out Venus in the evening.

Venus-gazing reminds me of a phone call we got at the planetarium back when I was a lecturer there.  It was from a person who was nearly terrified that the aliens were landing and that we (astronomers) hadn’t told anybody. I asked the caller what made them think the Earth was being invaded and they described how they had been watching this bright light in the western skies each night for a week and how that light got closer to the mountains each night and then disappear. They were sure that the alien ship was landing in the mountains each night. The caller was most upset when I explained that they were seeing the planet Venus set behind the mountains, just as the Sun did each night.  Well, I don’t know if they were upset at finding out what they were seeing or embarrassed at not having made the connection between the Sun setting behind the mountains and the planets (and stars) doing the same.

This was years before the Comet Hale-Bopp Heaven’s Gate cult madness and not long before I went back to school and spent some of my grad school years studying comets.  We were used to getting phone calls from the public about mysterious lights in the sky, but the imaginative stories some people told never failed to amaze (and sometimes sadden) me.

It seems that when it comes to the sky and understanding what’s in it, somehow some people suspend their common sense, their sense of disbelief, and will swallow anything.  I don’t know why that is. I just know that it happens.  Which is too bad, because actually studying and understanding how things in the sky work is a very satisfying and fascinating journey.  It’s not different from understanding (in general terms) how a car engine works or how a plane works.  If you want to know, you probably ask somebody who works on cars, or you find a book on how planes fly.  You seek to understand the physical reasons why the car runs and the plane flies.

We wouldn’t tell somebody that a car works by magic or that a plane goes up into the air because of magical spirits that lift it up, would we?  So, why, upon seeing a bright light in the sky, did a person jump to an unsupported conclusion that it was a shipload of LGMs on some kind of tour of the planets?  Why did the Heaven’s Gaters decide that a known comet was a mothership?  They didn’t use common sense — well, let me say that the person who called me at the planetarium at least wanted to know what the light really was. The Heaven’s Gaters didn’t want to know (0r couldn’t let themselves find out) what Comet Hale-Bopp really was.

Certainly stargazing lights some amazing thought-fires in your brain.  It certainly does in mine, and I’ve been lucky to be able to share those thoughts with readers since early 2002. It’s been a grand time doing a grand of postings!

stargazing, storytelling

Starry Tale? Starry Science? Both? Neither?

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Depends on How You Look at It

I spent last week at a planetarium conference held by the SouthEastern Planetarium Association (SEPA). It was held in Kingsport, Tennessee, and the host planetarium was at Bays Mountain Park — a great place to visit and the meeting was really enjoyable. The theme of the meeting was “Storytelling” and since Mark and I bill ourselves at Loch Ness Productions as “Storytellers of the Universe” we fit right in. We presented a show that Mark did the soundtrack for, called SpacePark360: Geodesium Edition — it’s really a production of Dome3D, and the story was “have fun!” — since it is a thrill park ride set on other planets. It was well-received and great to see in the fulldome theater at Bays Mountain Park.

Since the theme was about telling stories, several speakers, such as Lynn Moroney, focused on it with storytelling experiences — and stories — of their own. The keynote speaker was Dava Sobel, author of Galileo’s Daughter, Longitude, and several other well-written books.

Why storytelling? Because planetarium folk — indeed, anyone who teaches (formally or informally) — are storytellers. And, most of us who grew up in planetariums learned to be storytellers. It’s part of our shared heritage as planetarium folk. So, hearing from storytellers is a good thing at a meeting. Of course, the stories we astronomy types tell are focused on the stars, but there’s always some amount of the human experience in them. That shows up in the star legends that various cultures ell about what’s in the sky.

The star patterns are logical choices, and so you find lots of drama among the constellations. The other day I wrote about the very useful ways that The Big Dipper helps us find our way around the sky. If you find the Dipper and instead of using the curve to find Arcturus, use the Pointer stars to find the North Star — but keep going! Eventually you run into a W-shaped (or M-shaped, or 3-shaped, all depending on what time of year you look) pattern. It’s called Cassiopeia.

Of  course, there’s a story about Cassiopeia that involves her husband the king, a mythical hero,a fair maiden, and a monster or two. A long time ago, back when there were a lot more shepherds than there are now, the Greeks thought that pattern reminded them of that queen — who, incidentally,  had quite a reputation for being self-absorbed, vain, all “me, me, me” (in the modern parlance).  And, let’s not forget taht she had a penchant for making her daughter’s life miserable.  She was such a good object lesson in how NOT to behave that the Greeks put her up in the sky as a reminder to all people (of any gender) that vanity and other character flaws are not admirable traits — even acting all self-absorbed does get you a glittery star pattern to your name! (Run over here for some more background on the tales and science of Cassiopeia.)

Those star tales like the rather lenthy and involved one about Cassiopeia are the stock in trade of starry storytellers like me and my colleagues in the planetarium profession when we want to acquaint people with the rudiments of getting around the sky.  I could just show you five stars in the shape of a smooshed M (or W), but if I tie it to a story, it’s more memorable. The constellations we describe are the stuff of stargazing. Those patterns help us find our way around the sky and give us reference points to directions, time of year, season, and many other useful bits of knowledge. So, check ’em out!