100 Hours of Astronomy!

Rational parents, this is an event not to be missed, especially if your kids love astronomy, like mine do! Astronomers around the world have been organizing 100 hours of astronomy activities for the public! And if you’ve missed the beginning, it’s not quite done yet — you can still join in the fun tonight (look here for activities in your area).

Friday night I got to see the rings of Saturn with my own eyes for the first time. OK, so the light was bent a little by some mirrors and lenses, but it’s still cool that your can see a speck of light in the sky, and if someone points a big enough telescope at it, you can see that it really does have rings, just like in all the pictures! And that’s not all.

In addition to setting up telescopes in town (and letting people look through them!), the local polytechnic institute (ETH) has set up an exhibit (like a temporary astronomy museum) explaining astronomy and astrophysics. You can learn about how stars and nebulas are formed, about the composition of the universe (how dark matter and dark energy compares to the stuff we can see), and about the instruments people use to study the cosmos.

This is especially fun for my son Nico, who has gotten really interested in astronomy through books and the Internet. The funny thing is that he can tell you the relative sizes of Rigel and Sirius, but we hadn’t taken the time to take him outside at night and show him that you can look up in the sky and see those very stars with your own eyes. Now we’re changing that.

This “100 hours of astronomy” is such a cool effort since — with all of the ubiquitious outdoor lighting these days — people today don’t see the stars as much as earlier generations did, and most of us don’t really understand what we’re missing. I keep thinking of the description by a friend of mine of the sky in Mongolia, far from cities and buildings:

Those nights were extraordinary. Hundreds of kilometers from the nearest population center, our galaxy came alive each night. It was impossible to walk around camp without the Milky Way catching my eye and drawing my gaze upward. This was mid-August, and the Perseid meteor showers were adorning the sky with their own celestial fireworks. It was heady stuff.

I wish I could see that. But if you don’t have the opportunity to travel across Mongolia, at least you can go out tonight and an astonomer will show you the craters on the moon!