CN3y Sharing the Sky Weblog No. 23
Star Night plus: More Lectures for the National Sharing the Sky Foundation.
On Saturday, May 7, the Sharing the Sky team faced a breathtakingly hot afternoon, with temperatures hitting 96 degrees F., to celebrate Astronomy Day with our latest Star Night. Although we have conducted this event for thirteen years, our early events were not part of Sharing the Sky. Since we founded Sharing the Sky in 2005, we have conducted six Star Nights on the University of Arizona Mall. During this event I gave several brief lectures, including one in the Planetarium. During this lecture my thoughts turned to people who, like my audience, had been attracted to the sky. I shared a story involving President Lincoln, who, while walking after dinner, visited the Naval observatory and asked Asaph Hall to show him objects through the great telescope at the Naval Observatory. I also imagined a distant shore, where Tennyson was setting up a telescope to begin an evening of stargazing from his Farringford estate on the Isle of Wight. Later I made several very brief presentations outdoors on the Mall.
Sharing the Sky has enjoyed an active few weeks. Since our annual meeting last March 9,. we have presented several new lectures. Two of these presentations were at the Wendee and David Levy Observatory at Corona Foothills Middle School in southeast Corona de Tucson, itself southeast of Tucson, Arizona. The first was dedicated to an old and familiar but still important subject, a survey of different basic kinds of telescopes. I pointed out examples of reflectors, refractors and the compound modern Schmidt-Cassegrains. The second one, delivered on May 3, dealt not with telescopes or optics but with the field of meteor observing. Despite the fact that I regularly observe using at least a dozen telescopes, my favorite observing normally requires no telescope whatsoever, just a lawn chair, a clear morning, and a meteor counter. This particular season, on the morning of May 5, I observed 7 meteors while my frequent observing partner, Thom Peck, used my telescope. Despite the absence of visual telescope observing that morning, I did obtain more than 200 pictures through ten cameras. Hopefully one day, two or three of these photographs will reveal a new comet.
The third lecture was at Roslyn, the school I attended from 1956 to 1960. Those Roslyn years were never lost on me, and this day I spoke to over 90 children about comets.
Roslyn School in April 2011. The two large windows to the immediate left of the entrance doors house my sixth grade class; the set of windows on the first floor beytopnd may be my second grade class in 1956.
A fourth lecture was in two parts, the first of which was delivered to just two or three people. At Mercy College I had organized a meeting with some of the University honors students; however none of them showed up at the appointed time and place. As we were sitting there deciding what to do, I summarized my topic, quoting a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden that means a lot to me:
I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, then he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. . . .
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. (Thoreau, Walden.))
These powerful words outline a strategy, a way of life that is attractive to the University student I was in 1972 at Acadia University and which still resonates. They were clearly pointed out to me by my brother Gerry after I graduated in May 1972, when he presented me with a poster on which these magical words were inscribed. It is not the design of this way of life to conform with others’ plans and dreams that is the key, but instead to follow your own passion.
That evening, the proposed lecture also having been cancelled, I attended a dinner at Mercy’s Bronx campus. There I had the chance to introduce myself again and share the words that meant so much. In a second, follow-up meeting, I quoted different words, part of a speech that Senator Carl Shurz gave in 1859 at Fanueil Hall in Boston: There, on the eve of the American civil war, Shurz found the time to talk about dreams and ideals, comparing mere wisps of the mind to the mighty heavens:
“Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like he seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.”
As unrelated as these two quotations appear, they serve well to describe my values. It is also the philosophy of Sharing the Sky to help the people with whom it interacts to discover those ideals and live by them.