Legacy Magazine

The space shuttle Endeavour and the International Space Station rise from the northwest horizon, as seen from New York City on February 21, 2010. Courtesy Jim Cook.

By Rhana Smout Paris

Do you know what phase the moon is in right now? Can you find the North Star? Pick out a constellation and tell me a story about its creation.

If you can do any of the above, you are in the minority in America. There was a time when knowing the night sky meant knowing when best to plant your next crop, finding your way home on the open sea, or giving a frightened child a comforting connection to the dark night. Nowadays, most people tend to rush from one lighted spot to the next. Few of us stop to look at the night sky, much less stay outside long enough for our eyes to adjust to the dark.

And yet, astronomy programs are popular with interpreters and visitors alike—why? How can you create an astronomy program that follows a proper interpretive approach when the subject is inherently intangible to most people?

While it was by no means a thorough survey, I had a chance to ask a couple of fellow interpreters why they did astronomy programs. Each was excited and specific about what they and their participants got from the experience. John Fullwood said that astronomy programs were “rewarding personally because visitors came to learn and enjoy the night sky.” Saiward Turnbaugh spoke about the mind-boggling nature of black holes and how they can be hard to grasp. She likes how astronomy discussions open up other questions. While talking with James Wooten, he became animated in his description of some of his favorite star activities, relating how he likes to give the kids time to create their own constellations on butcher paper, complete with their own star stories.

Jim Cook, a volunteer interpreter who provides his personal telescope for others to use, perhaps said it best: “Suddenly I had been given the power to show people the moon and Saturn. And so wherever I went, I did.” He goes on, “Obviously, I would show people other objects, too, but the moon, and especially Saturn, have always been in a class by themselves. My reward was simply hearing people say, usually in a rather hushed voice, ‘Oh…my…God.’ Or, in the case of younger kids, it’s often an excited, ‘I see it! I see it!’ It’s a very special feeling to be able to evoke such expressions from people.”

From a visitor’s perspective, where else but the night sky can you easily experience such grandeur? It is almost as if the human body is built for looking up at and being amazed by the night sky—when we tilt our head back, the jaw automatically drops open so we might utter one syllable: “Wow!” Sure, you can get the same effect at lots of amazing places—standing near the ocean or at the rim of the Grand Canyon—but not everyone can travel to such sites. The night sky and its light show are free to anyone who goes to their backyard, roof top, or local park. Folks just need someone to teach them how to get around the universe!

The scattering of stars across the dome of the sky can look random to the untrained eye. I am often asked whether people long ago had better imaginations or were smoking something to create anything from such a mess. Tell a compelling, universally understood story about love and jealously or foolishness and redemption, and the stars’ patterns that make the constellations become more clear and the stories memorable. I can’t think of a culture that doesn’t have at least one story to explain how constellations came to be. Often they represent a who’s who of the heroes and villains of a local people and provide the storyteller with a reminder of the important moral stories to be passed on to the next generation—a kind of mnemonics in the sky.

One of my favorite stories requires the audience’s help to tell it properly. It is the Greek story of Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Perseus, Pegasus, and Cetus. These constellations are found near the North Star and most are visible throughout most of the year. Each character has an associated sound, which the audience utters in unison when that character’s name is said over the course of the story. Cassiopeia warrants a hiss for being conceited, Andromeda gets a girlish sigh, and so on. Start telling that story to a squirmy group of school kids and you get instant attention. The message is passed on—bad behavior begets punishment—and the constellations are learned.

The themes an astronomy program could follow are as numerous as the stars themselves. The vocabulary can be equally dense—from zenith to nadir, declination to right ascension, or Messier objects to black holes, to name a few. I will often move from the moon to the planets to deeper space to establish an organized flow for a general astronomy program. Other times I will focus only on the moon or only on that season’s constellation stories. Find the topic that suits you best and bootstrap common ideas and items to help your participants grasp the vastness of space.

The constellations Orion and Taurus battle over Black Hill Regional Park’s Lake Seneca, in Boyds, Maryland. Photo by Jim Cook.

Such programs don’t require much investment in equipment to be successful. They can be as basic as walking outside and looking up or as involved as coordinating with a local astronomy club that, in all likelihood, is more than happy to share its telescopes and knowledge with your group. Star charts are easy to obtain and will work for most places in North America—the stories you tell at a campfire on the East Coast will serve the visitors well when they return to the West.

Shake out your hands! Now you have a handy tool for measuring distances in space, which is measured in degrees. With your arm outstretched, the width of your little finger is about one degree, your fist is 10 degrees across, and the distance between the tips of your little finger and your thumb, when your hand is stretched out like the American Sign Language symbol for the letter Y, is 25 degrees. It doesn’t matter if you are a star basketball player or a little kindergartner—these widths of fingers and hands hold when found at the end of an arm that is proportionately long.

This measurement sleight of hand comes in “handy” when describing where one celestial object is in relation to another. Look for the Big Dipper—it is the constellation that looks like a side-view of a saucepan in the northern part of the night sky. The depth of the “saucepan” is about five degrees and its opening is about 10 degrees across. Want to find the North Star? Extend the front edge of the “saucepan” up about 28 degrees and you have Polaris.

Use this hand measurement trick the next time you see the full moon rising in the east. Put your little finger next to the moon. What, at first, appears to measure about two inches wide will appear to shrink in size to be, in actuality, less than one degree wide. Other knowledge about the moon is equally transferable to anywhere on Earth. There is something comforting about seeing the moon where I am and knowing that wherever my loved ones are on Earth, they are seeing the same moon in the same phase, whenever their nighttime happens to come. As the refrain of the old lullaby goes, “I see the moon, and the moon sees me, and the moon sees the one that I long to see.” This concept of family and longing is universally understood.

Distances, sizes, and speeds are perhaps the most daunting subjects to make understandable to the general public. The distance to the nearest star, the sizes of the planets, and the speed the galaxy is traveling are all measured in numbers that make the national deficit look small. Using relative sizes and distances can help make these numbers more manageable and relevant to visitors.

For instance, if we were to travel to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to us within our Milky Way galaxy, it would be like an ant working his way across America. A lot can happen to an ant on such a journey! Here is another analogy: If the sun is the size of a ping pong ball, Sirius, the brightest star to us, would be the size of a tennis ball. How far would I need to throw the tennis ball in order to keep the relative distance between these two stars in proportion to their new sizes? Across the room? Across the street? Try 1,000 miles away—from my location in North Carolina, that would be like throwing the tennis ball all the way to New Orleans. Say I wanted to travel to the sun. At 93 million miles away, that is no small distance, but what does 93 million miles mean to a kid? Let’s use transportation that is available to the common man. I have a couple of options. I could save money and drive to the sun—a car travelling 55 miles an hour would take 193 years to make the trip one way. Don’t want to spend that much time behind the wheel? A 747 airplane, at a rate of 600 miles an hour, would take 17 years. And then you have to come back to Earth—talk about a road trip!

Justifying the purpose of an astronomy program might seem out of reach. Save for planetariums, what facility or park truly deals with objects and phenomena so far removed from daily existence? For general knowledge, perhaps—point out the North Star in a campfire program and you might help a scout find his way back to camp. But who really needs to know astronomy?

A park ranger once questioned inventor John Dobson about the appropriateness of bringing telescopes to a public park. Dobson devised the mount that allows amateurs to build their own telescopes from common items and inspired the Sidewalk Astronomers, a volunteer group that conducts impromptu star programs on the streets of San Francisco. “The sky is not part of the park,” the ranger was reported to have said. Dobson replied, “No, but the park is part of the sky.”

We might not need to know the phase of the moon to plant our backyard tomatoes. More than likely, our GPS will get us back to port. And you can plug in a nightlight if your child is scared of the dark. Still, I think having a relationship with the night sky is something primal and universal. Carl Sagan once said that we are made of star dust. Science backs this up. So maybe the stars are not so much “out there” and removed from our everyday lives. We, like Dobson’s park, are part of the stars.

So take a break from the artificial lights of our modern existence and take a walk outside some star-filled night. Let your eyes adjust. Allow your head to flop back and your jaw to drop open. All together now: “Wow….”

For More Information
Ham, Sam H. (1992.) Environmental Interpretation: A Practical Guide for People with Big Ideas and Small Budgets. Golden, CO: North American Press.

Moser, Don. (2005.) 35 Who Made a Difference: John Dobson. Retrieved March 1, 2010, from www.Smithsonian.com.

Rhana Smout Paris is a long-time interpreter and frequent presenter at NAI National Workshops. She is the outreach coordinator at the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island. The author thanks Jim Cook, John Fullwood, Saiward Turnbaugh, and James Wooten for their feedback.