William Keel has spent several years listening for the gasp – the sound a 6-year-old makes as he sees Saturn with his own wide eyes. When Keel hears this sound, he knows a young boy’s textbook-limited ideas about the cosmos have just transformed.
“I think one thing that people may not realize is there is really nothing like seeing it with your own eyes, no matter how much you think that Saturn is a picture we have stuck inside of a telescope,” Keel, a UA astronomy professor, said. “I think it’s criminal that people don’t pay attention to most of the universe around them. We want to encourage that. It’s well worth doing.”
The department’s public nights series was designed specifically for that endeavor. Once a month in the fall and spring semesters, the University’s department of physics and astronomy opens its telescopes to area enthusiasts who wish to get a closer view of the night sky.
To escape the bright campus lighting, the astronomy department will move the location of the March 15 event from Gallalee Hall to Moundville Archaeological Park.
“[On campus,] people just lose the sense of how much they’re missing,” Keel said. “We do a couple of events every year – typically one in the spring and one in the fall – in Moundville far away from city lights, where things start to look like their pictures. People are just stunned.”
Although they have to plan around the weather, event organizers said they hope to get a clear view of more than one celestial body.
“Jupiter is well-placed in the night sky, and it’s the only one of the bright planets that can be seen,” Jeremy Irwin, an astronomy professor involved in the public nights event, said. “But I think the big thing we want to show is the Comet Pan-STARRS, which should be passing by the Northern Hemisphere.”
Irwin said Comet Pan-STARRS is an intensely bright comet, observable to the naked eye.
“It’s been visible in the Southern Hemisphere for weeks,” he said. “It’s the first one we’ve had in a couple of years.”
In addition to offering public use of the telescope, professors and researchers from the astronomy and physics department host the events and share their extraterrestrial knowledge with the public. These lectures cover a range of topics such as the discovery of the Higgs Boson, as well as nebulae and star clusters. Keel said the public nights aim to steer inquisitive youth toward careers in science.
When asked about the purpose of the series, Keel replied, “Only slightly facetiously, [it’s] warping young minds. It’s reasonably popular almost everywhere. People do it because astronomy is such a visual science, and some people have kindly described it as a gateway drug for the rest of the sciences.”
Irwin agreed getting children excited about learning astronomy is the program’s main goal.
“A lot of people grew up in the city with a lot of light pollution, so this may be their first chance to really see the night sky or look through a telescope,” he said.
Floyd Maseda, a first-year graduate student at the University, has gone to every public night this academic year. He said the educational power of the program is invaluable, especially for children.
“Looking at the celestial objects themselves is really cool for the kids because they always hear about things like Jupiter and star clusters and stuff, and even see pictures on the Internet or TV,” Maseda said. “But actually seeing them in real life makes the experience much more memorable.”
Although images of heavenly bodies fill the pages of elementary school textbooks, Keel can attest that firsthand witness inspired the awed gasp of a 6-year-old.
