Night at the Museum Visits Space!

It’s a cloudy night in Iowa City, but that’s not stopping this Friday’s Night at the Museum, which focuses on the night sky and stars.  The usual standbys are on the schedule – pizza, Hageboeck Hall of Birds and Mammal Hall in the dark – but today’s program features a visit from the Cedar Amateur Astronomers, who’ve brought their telescopes all the way from Mount Vernon and set up shop on the Pentacrest.

Before there’s any stargazing, however, the astronomers have lots to teach – people have been gazing at the stars for hundreds of years, all of them wondering what was out there.  The children learn of astronomers of old times – Eratosthenes, Ptolemy – who thought the planets revolved around the sun.  They learn of astronomers of (slightly) more recent times – Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler – who built telescopes to see farther into the sky.   (The children play with cardboard telescopes for several minutes, looking at everything they can.) It’s easy to think of astronomy as unfixed, unchanging, that for all of history people have looked out onto the stars and come to the same conclusion, but our conceptions of astronomy are constantly changing, as we learn more about the moon and the sun, the constellations and the brightest of stars. 

After a jaunt through Mammal Hall and some snacks in the Biosphere Discovery Hub, the children don their fall jackets and head outside to the Pentacrest, where the astronomers have set up two telescopes.  It’s cloudy, so there aren’t many stars; instead, the children use the telescopes to look right into the Old Capitol.  (Still, some of them find Venus, shouting, “It’s Venus!” and “Hi, Venus!” as they wait.) Not all of them have used telescopes before, and they come back for second and third looks, captivated by the view the telescope gives them – they’ve all seen the Old Capitol before, but not this way.

As soon as everyone’s back in the auditorium, the astronomers load a computer program that’ll let the children see the stars without clouds.  Once they understand what they’re seeing, the children want to see everything – they want to see the stars in all the seasons, from every angle.  The computer program also maps lines on top of the constellations – sometimes the constellations are hard to pick out, composed of bright stars and some very dim ones – and once the astronomers show this feature to the children, they’re hooked.  It’s nature’s very own game of connect the dots, and who can pass that up? They want to see the Big Dipper, the Northern Star, Sagittarius and Gemini, the bear and the fish; they even want to see Andromeda, the closest galaxy to ours.

There’s something about the stars that’s impossible to ignore – why else have we looked at them for so long? We love mysteries – how we love the thrill of the unexplainable – but what’s more, we love to solve them.  Yet the night sky is that one mystery that can’t be solved.  We’re finding clues, making patterns, but the real answer is forever hidden.  And maybe that’s okay. 

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian