The Downtown Astronomy Party
By Daniel Wicklund
In 1967, a Chinese-born man named John Dobson left the Vedantan monastery where he had worked for 23 years to start an organization called the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers. He had a passion for the universe, seen through a telescope, and wanted to share it with as many people as possible. Night after night, he would wheel out his home-built telescopes on discarded wagon wheels to the corner of Broderick and Jackson streets and talk about the stars. Humanity used to be intimately familiar with the stars that speckle the night sky; but now we need an occasion, a vacation, or perhaps a teacher to push us to explore that which we all once wondered about.
The city is undoubtedly not the best place to see the night sky, but it does have the benefit of being near the most people. Even downtown Seattle, on a spring evening, illuminated by the glow of the Climate Pledge Arena, the blue-green cranes, the futuristic alabaster of the Space Needle, and the glow of trillions upon trillions of water molecules scattering visible light in all directions in the atmosphere, can be host to the wonder of seeing the universe. As DTS Astronomy & Advanced Physics students learned about the origins of the universe 13.7 billion years ago, they complemented it by gazing out into the cosmos and glimpsing objects that were formed near the dawn of the universe. In the words of T.S. Eliot, we looked toward the place “where we started, [to] know the place for the first time.”
Ancient photons, born of stars like our sun, but 12 million years ago, graced our eyes as we gazed toward a wispy cloud in the telescope that was Bode’s Galaxy. The tight-packed stars of the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules regaled our eyes from just 25,000 light years away, and still closer, the Jolly Roger cluster (our favorite of the night) showed us the patterns of newborn stars still close to their place of birth.
The night sky can be enchanting, from the sidewalks of San Francisco to the rooftops of Seattle, and on Wednesday, June 8th, the DTS Astronomy & Advanced Physics students hosted the first annual DTS Star Party. The students dazzled their peers with informative presentations and their passion for the night sky. There were astronomy-themed snacks, prizes, and lots of deep curiosity about the universe on display. The weather may have been uncooperative in the end, but it did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of attendees and the excitement of the presenters.