The weeklong (April 19-26) celebration of the night is supported by the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA). It is an opportunity for us all to consider the role of the night and its star-filled sky in each of our lives. This year, IDA is encouraging people around the world to come together online to celebrate the night and engage with authors, creators, scientists, and educators whose works have been vital to the movement to protect the night from light pollution.
“Right now, families around the globe find themselves spending many hours at home together,” notes Ruskin Hartley, IDA’s executive director. “It’s a perfect time to reconnect with the night sky — and International Dark-Sky Week provides a portal for that experience.”
The week includes online presentations by a couple of authors that we have featured in the past on Seattle Astronomy. Paul Bogard wrote one of our favorite books, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light (Little, Brown and Company, 2013). Bogard will do a reading from the book Tuesday, April 21. Tyler Nordgren, a professor of physics and an artist, will do a talk about the role of art in conversation on Monday, April 20. Nordgren has created a series of great solar system travel posters and is the author of Sun Moon Earth: The History of Solar Eclipses from Omens of Doom to Einstein and Exoplanets (Basic Books, 2016). Jeffrey Bennett, author of What Is Relativity?: An Intuitive Introduction to Einstein’s Ideas, and Why They Matter (Columbia University Press, 2014), will give a presentation called “I, Humanity” on Sunday, April 19. It is geared toward kids in grades five through seven.
There will be numerous other presentations about various astronomical topics. You can access the full schedule online, but beware that it isn’t particularly user friendly, and specific times for most of the presentations have not yet been set as of this writing.
Further reading:
- Our review of Sun, Moon, Earth
- Coverage of Nordgren’s talk at Town Hall Seattle in 2017
- Coverage of Nordgren’s talk at the Seattle Astronomical Society 2014 banquet
- Post about Bogard’s 2013 talk at Town Hall Seattle
- Coverage of Bennett’s 2015 talk at the Seattle Astronomical Society
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