International Dark Sky Week April 19-26

International Dark Sky Week is coming around at just the right time.

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

Do not miss this! Tyler Nordgren and solar eclipses

Tyler Nordgren wants to make sure that what happened to him as a nine-year-old astronomy nut doesn’t happen to you this summer.

Tyler Nordgren reads an excerpt from his book Sun Moon
Earth during a presentation January 14, 2017 at Town
Hall Seattle. Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Nordgren, a professor of physics at the University of Redlands and author of Sun Moon Earth: The History of Solar Eclipses From Omens of Doom to Einstein and Exoplanets (Basic Books, 2016), talked at Town Hall Seattle earlier this month about the book and his work to educate the public about the total solar eclipse that will cross the United States on August 21, 2017.

As a kid Nordgren was passionate about astronomy and already knew he wanted to be an astronaut. He was living in Portland, Oregon in 1979 when a total solar eclipse passed right over his house.

“Because of the news warning us about looking at the Sun, I was sure that if I accidentally looked at the Sun during the eclipse, there were these special rays that would come out and burn my eyes,” he recalled. “So I hid in the house with the curtains drawn and I watched it on TV.”

He could tell the eclipse was happening because the house got really dark, but that was his one and only take-away from the event.

“One of the things that has driven me to work on this and to help promote this eclipse that is coming up this year is I don’t want to see another nine-year-old child out there having the experience that I did!” Nordgren said.

Good things come to those who wait

“It took me twenty years to eventually, finally see (a total solar eclipse) for myself,” Nordgren noted. He described what it’s like, the things that happen approaching and during totality, but said that he had an unexpected reaction to that first totality.

“As an astronomer, I know the mechanics of the celestial alignment, yet in this moment of totality, I fully understand the difference between knowledge and feeling,” he said. “When I finally, after 20 years, got a chance to see this for myself as a professional astronomer south of Budapest in Hungary in 1999, I swear the hair stood up on the back of my neck. It still remains the most amazing thing I have ever seen in the sky.”

“I could understand why generations of human beings would cower in fear at this,” he added, “and wonder, ‘When is the life-giving Sun going to come back?’”

Eclipse science

Nordgren described some of the stories different cultures cooked up to explain eclipses, and also discussed some of the science done during eclipses, including the determination, from spectra, that the Sun was largely made of hydrogen and contained some iron. Helium was discovered on the Sun 25 years before it was found on Earth. Perhaps the most famous science made possible by an eclipse was the determination that mass can indeed bend light waves, as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity and measured during a solar eclipse in 1919. The media coverage turned Einstein from an obscure physicist into an icon.

“This is what made Einstein Einstein in the popular culture,” Nordgren said.

Do not miss this!

This August’s total solar eclipse will be the first to cross the United States from coast to coast since 1918. Nordgren, also an artist, has designed travel posters for many of the spots along the path of totality, and shared them as he talked about the path the eclipse will take. You can see, and buy, them on his website.

He pointed out that virtually everyone in the country will be able to see some degree of partial solar eclipse, but he urged us all not to settle and stay home just because there might be traffic.
“Do not miss this!” Nordgren urged.

“The difference between being inside and outside that path of totality is literally the difference between night and day,” he noted. “Inside totality, the sky goes black, the Sun turns dark, the stars come out, the corona is visible. Outside totality, yeah, it kinda gets sorta dark. Yeah, use your glasses. Yeah, there’s a bite taken out of the Sun. But it will pale in comparison to what you experience—not just what you see, but what you feel inside that path of totality.”

Nordgren said a good solar eclipse may be just the thing that we need.

“In difficult times, when, heaven knows, there have been lots of things that do not unite us, here is going to be a moment in which we are all united under the shadow of the Moon, and we will all be seeing this together,” he said. “This will become the most photographed, the most Tweeted, the most Instagrammed, the most shared group moment in the history of the world.”
“That’s what we have to look forward to this summer,” he concluded.

Book review: Sun Moon Earth by Tyler Nordgren

Tyler Nordgren’s new book Sun Moon Earth: The History of Solar Eclipses from Omens of Doom to Einstein and Exoplanets (Basic Books, 2016) is a must read for anyone with even the slightest interest in the heavens, or in the total solar eclipse that will sweep across the United States on August 21, 2017. It’s far more than a where-to-go and how-to-see-it tale, although those pointers do show up at the end (don’t stare at the partially eclipsed Sun without proper, certified shielding, folks.) The fun part is the history lesson suggested by the subtitle.

Indeed, total solar eclipses have been happening for millennia, and Nordgren travels the world to examine what ancient cultures made of this unusual phenomenon. The complete blotting out of the Sun was seldom considered a good thing by people who didn’t understand what was really going on. It has only been in very recent times that the total solar eclipse has been embraced as a tourist attraction. Nordgren’s explanations of how scientific thinking developed and helped explain what was happening during eclipses are engaging and fascinating, as are his tales of the science that has only been possible during these rare events.

Nordgren has become an eclipse chaser himself, and I enjoyed his accounts of his travels to view eclipses, especially his trip to the relatively remote Faroe Islands, between Scotland, Iceland, and Norway, for the eclipse of March 20, 2015. The islands are not exactly the world’s leading tourism destination, and yet they were on that day because it was one of the few dry-land locations from which to see that particular eclipse. It was an interesting tale of the lengths to which people will go to get into the path of totality of a solar eclipse, and how the communities within that path prepare and react to the event.

Most people seem to agree that next year’s total solar eclipse will be seen by more people than any other in history. Often times the path of totality mostly passes over water, as it did for the Faroe Islands in 2015. The last time a total solar eclipse crossed the U.S. like this was in June of 1918. The 2017 eclipse will cross a huge land mass with a large population, many opportunities for tourists, and easy access to the path of totality all along the way.

Sun Moon Earth is a delightful read and would be a most welcome gift for anyone on your list with an interest in astronomy. We included it in our recent gift guide for astronomy buffs.

Author Nordgren is a renaissance man of sorts. He’s a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Redlands. He’s also a photographer and an artist and has done a variety of beautiful travel posters for the eclipse as well as for other tourist spots around the solar system. They’re available on his website and also referenced in our gift guide. He’s done a great deal of work on night sky astronomy programs in National Parks. He’s the author of Stars Above, Earth Below: A Guide to Astronomy in the National Parks (Praxis, 2010) and spoke about the topic at the 2014 annual banquet of the Seattle Astronomical Society. He’ll be in town again to talk about Sun Moon Earth January 14 at Town Hall Seattle. Tickets are $5 and are available online.

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