Astronomy Days will have museum visitors seeing stars

The people who come out to the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences’ Astronomy Days tend to dress the part.

When Kari Wouk, event organizer and the museum’s senior manager of educational collaborations, walks around Astronomy Days, everyone she sees is wearing space clothes – shirts with stars and planets, that kind of thing.

“It’s really cute,” Wouk says. There are many ways to get interested in astronomy, she notes, from sci-fi to hard science to simply going outside and looking at the night sky, which is reflected even in the outfits of Astronomy Days attendees.

And they pack the presentations, too. Indeed, the museum holds several scientific weekend festivals each year – Reptile and Amphibian Day and Bugfest among them – but Astronomy Days’ packed schedule reflects the sheer dedication and excitement of astronomy lovers. On Jan. 27 and 28, there are four simultaneous presentations going on all day both days, and Wouk knows the astronomer and astronaut guests can expect capacity crowds.

“Every single one of those talks has a full room,” she says. “The people who are coming to Astronomy Days, our visitors, are really, really into it.”

This year’s theme, Telescopes and Missions, was chosen in celebration of the James Webb Space Telescope, which was initially slated for a 2018 launch (It has since been pushed back to 2019). When it does launch, Webb will replace the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been in orbit since 1990.

“That’s a really big deal, so that’s why we chose telescopes as a theme this year,” says Wouk.

Galactic scope

Different telescopes see the universe differently, and it’s by combining what they observe that we’re able to get a more detailed understanding of the cosmos. Spitzer Space Telescope, Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Hubble are three major telescopes that see different parts of the spectrum, Wouk explains.

“Just the X-ray shows you this image, just the UV shows you this, just the visible shows you this, and then you put them together and you’re starting to figure out what’s out there in the universe,” she says.

Astronomer Rachel Smith, head of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Lab at the museum (as well as its curator of meteorites) does a good bit of her research using the W.M. Keck Observatory, atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. It’s one of the largest ground-based optical infrared telescopes in the world, she says, and its high-elevation location – plus Hawaii’s consistently clear weather – makes Keck a prime location for observing stars. Plus, it’s a 10-meter telescope, making it a seriously big one.

“You can observe faint objects far away more than you could with a smaller telescope,” she says. “The smaller the telescope, the longer you have to observe something.”

Smith studies protoplanetary discs – rotating clouds of dust with a star in their center. These eventually form solar systems, and Smith analyzes the chemistry of these gas clouds. These are the ingredients that eventually form planets, she explains, and by studying these discs in the infrared, she can tell what molecules are present. She’s particularly interested in carbon, one of the building blocks of life as we know it.

“(I’m) trying to put our solar system in kind of a context,” Smith says.

Manned missions

Astronauts’ presentations always draw a packed house, Wouk said. They can speak about their past experiences, and they might have the possibility to go into space.

“Orion is a really big deal, of course, because Orion is going to send humans to Mars,” says Wouk. “That is something that NASA has been working really hard on out at (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory), and one of our speakers is coming from JPL to speak about that. Our current astronauts, they all have the potential of being the ones selected to go to Mars.”

One current astronaut who may have this distinction is Christina Koch, who was raised in North Carolina and was a guest at Astronomy Days two years ago. She watched Koch’s 2016 presentation three times. This year, astronaut Douglas Wheelock is an Astronomy Days guest.

“Most astronauts when they return to earth, they get a different perspective of the planet,” says Wouk. “It’s called the overview effect, where you are out in space and you see this planet and it looks so small and so fragile and you realize things like countries and borders mean so little, because we are all on this tiny, fragile planet together. You start thinking a lot more about conservation and that kind of thing.”

Astronauts come back physically changed, too, especially after long missions. Wouk notes astronaut Scott Kelly’s tough readjustment to gravity after his year on the International Space Station. Simply put, extended zero-gravity isn’t good for you, and Wouk respects astronauts for the price they pay.

“Exploring the new frontier is really serious,” Wouk says. “In order to even get this scientific knowledge, these guys and girls are really putting themselves out there.”

This story was originally published January 26, 2018 at 2:30 PM with the headline "Astronomy Days will have museum visitors seeing stars."