Do you remember those summer nights in your childhood, lying in the grass looking at the great expanse of starry sky, and marvelling at how long that light had travelled to reach your eyes? Things take on a new perspective when you are confronted with all that lively darkness and your own fleetingness… don’t they? These days you are probably too well dressed to sprawl on the grass, at least not in a sober state, but that doesn’t mean you can’t keep wondering about the great beyond. The UW Observatory is here for you. It is officially called the Gustav Bakos Observatory, but you might affectionately refer to it as ‘that big difficult to see dome thing on the physics building roof’ and still get plenty of nods from your fellow students. Since the Observatory has been in that same place on campus since 1967, even most alumni will know what you’re talking about.
So you want to see the stars in a more dignified and scientific manner? Free public tours occur once monthly, often on the first Wednesday of the month, and can both give you the opportunity to stargaze and become better educated about astronomy. The next public tour is at 9:00 pm on June 12th meeting in Physics room 308. If that doesn’t appeal to you much, there is still the whole lawn chair approach. As a child in a small-ish town there were winter nights when my parents would bundle me up and we would troop down to a parking lot down the street to see particularly interesting comet showers or half lunar eclipses…oh childhood!
Why wouldn’t you want to be familiar with the night’s sky? Amazing things have been happening outside of the Earth’s protective atmosphere but our observations of the night sky continue to answer far more questions than robots have so far. Chris Hadfield has just returned from an extremely fruitful 166 days in space. However all his experiments can’t amount to the revolutionary observations such as ‘the world is round’ and ‘the earth rotates around the sun’ accumulated from centuries of people observing the night sky.
Space is the next frontier, so wouldn’t you like to be able to point to a pinprick in the sky and say “That’s where Curiosity is. Yup, that’s Mars”? It is a humble way of pointing out your acceptance of life and the endlessness of time. For instance this is excellent for showing off to your friends who can probably only find the Big Dipper. (The line “Hey, look at the moon, Neil Armstrong walked there” sounds slightly less impressive, although if you can pick out the International Space Station as it orbits the sky that would be pretty impressive).
In the end you only know that you don’t know very much and there is a huge world out there full of things to learn. If Astronomy isn’t your thing, check out the other free exhibits around campus like EIT’s mineral and dinosaur displays or the assortment of taxidermied animals on the third floor of B1. The world is your oyster when you remain a child at heart.
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