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Star Parties: Putting the fun back in astronomy |
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Written by By Evan Schladow/Special to the World
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Sunday, 29 July 2007 |
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All right, I’ll admit it: I wasn’t thrilled about going to the Star Party. Heading to an astronomy party with your mother and 10-year-old sister is not the coolest way to spend a Friday night. I’m as much of an astronomy fan as you can be without owning a telescope, but I still would rather have stayed home watching reruns of Law and Order.
There’s something about telescopes that always puts me in a bad mood. It’s a kind of impatient, bored feeling, some leftover childhood repugnance about waiting in line to squint through a hole and see a white smudge.
So, of course, when I pull up to see just that, people standing in line peering through the viewers of telescopes, I decided to make this an in-and-out experience. If I hadn’t been covering the event for the Bonanza, I might have left then and there.
What a mistake that would have been. This was not the kind of star party I remembered from my younger days, the youngest kids excited at seeing the universe for the first time, the older kids bored because they were the same stars they had seen for years, and the adults downright vacant.
Here parents were chatting and sipping margaritas, while children threw rocks at the sand to understand how craters are formed. The telescopes, even as big as the monstrous 18-incher, showed the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, even clusters of hundreds of thousands of stars like I had never seen them before. In fact, I never had seen them before. This was so much more than just staring at a twinkling dot of light.
Even more remarkable, though, were the explanations. The organizers, Dr. Paul Guttman and Dr. George Malyj, told stories of the geysers of Miranda and the formation of galaxies, new stories I hadn’t heard at years of half-hearted astronomy events.
Even without the stunning views and mammoth telescopes, the universe shown through the astronomers’ words was as exciting as I had ever seen it.
Most amazing were the people. This was not education at the expense of fun. This was fun with some education thrown in. There on the beach, the water sparkling in the moonlight, people were enjoying themselves. If they learned something too, I couldn’t think of a better use for a Friday night.
The next star parties are the Perseid Meteor Shower observing event Saturday, Aug. 11, and the Celestial Gems of the Milky Way on Saturday, Sept. 8. All Star Parties have a 7 p.m. start time, with no arrivals permitted after 8 p.m. Bring your own picnic and dress warm in case you decide to stay late into the night with all the die-hard stargazers. Call (775) 881-7560 for more information.
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