‘The stars belong to everyone’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/01/2021 (2088 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Astronomer Scott Young knows stars: the three that twinkle in Orion’s Belt, the ones that shimmer in the Big Dipper, and those that make up constellations such as Taurus, which actually looks nothing like a charging bull and more like the letter ‘V.’

But starting Thursday night at 7 o’clock, he’ll know what it’s like to be one — albeit a much smaller one — when the Manitoba Museum launches a free weekly astronomy show, over Zoom, called the Dome@Home, that will run until March.

“Our show is the opening act,” says Young. “Then when it’s done, you go outside and see the real thing for yourself.”

To Young, there’s no better programming available than the celestial broadcast that glimmers above each night, with a constantly shifting cast of characters and an ancient narrative older than life itself. There’s also no subscription cost, and aside from urban light pollution, no local blackouts: all a viewer needs is the naked eye.

But Young, who says the show will be a little bit like if Bill Nye and David Suzuki were doing their best Letterman impressions, says the story of the sky gets much more interesting than its already-intriguing baseline when someone with their necks craned back or telescopes pointed skyward actually knows what they’re looking at.

So that’s the show’s concept: an appreciation enhancer, a learning tool, a piece of entertainment, and a passport to outer space from the inner sanctum of the home.

“We’re going to be talking about everything going on in the sky,” he says, with each episode focusing on current and upcoming phenomena and explaining how viewers at home can find them for themselves. There will also be question periods, activities such as learning how to use the Big Dipper as a clock, and a chance to look at telescope imagery from the local sky and from planetaria around the world.

This past year, with the Manitoba Museum’s planetarium closed for the bulk of the time, Young was doing virtual field trips to classes, beaming into schools to give the spiel he’d normally deliver at the downtown museum. The planetarium has also put on live broadcasts on Facebook and YouTube to explain such things as strange planetary alignments and movements, which are sometimes viewed by more than 10,000 people.

The idea for the show arose from that, and with funding through the provincial government, it became a reality.

The first episode will be broadcast from Young’s home, not from the planetarium. “It turns out the dome is terrible for Wi-Fi,” he says. But future broadcasts could be done remotely, such as from Bird’s Hill on a particularly clear night.

Some clarifications: you don’t need binoculars or a telescope to participate, and you definitely don’t need to be outside freezing with your laptop either, Young says.

“The stars belong to everyone,” he adds, and upcoming events the show will touch on include the landing of NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover in February, the appearance of Venus in the night sky soon after, and the appearance of the winter constellations like Taurus, which are brighter and are “the perfect place to see the death and life of a star.”

As a kid, Young says he fell in love with astronomy when visiting the museum’s planetarium. “I knew it was my thing and what I wanted to do,” he says.

With the planetarium closed, he says the 40-minute show could be the next best thing, and might help people who feel reasonably constrained in the current world realize how vast it truly is.

“In the city, we might not get the best view of the sky,” he says, “But I’d hate for the next Carl Sagan to be out there and never get a chance to discover it.”

Show details are available at manitobamuseum.ca. To participate over Zoom, registration is required, but it will be simulcast live over Facebook with no need for registry. Classes begin at 7 p.m.