First of all - May the Fourth Be With You.
Second, I must confess that I have plagiarised the title of this entry from our visitor Susan last night who has a blog titled Sand and Stars. Check it out if you are interested in astronomy.
Tonight we camped out in tents in the middle of the Kalahari desert. It was also the night I had most been looking forward to since we started putting this class together. Our guide Stephen had found a woman who lives close by with a degree in astronomy who was willing to come to our camp and give us a tour of the night sky. According to Stephen, she was even more excited about doing this than we were about experiencing it and had been preparing for months.
Susan was the most delightful, extremely British, charming , quirky and knowledgeable person - absolutely perfect for a star-gazing session in the Kalahari desert. I suppose one would have to be pretty unique and unusual to live in the middle of the desert and travel around with a dog and a telescope observing , charting and mapping stars.
She had brought large charts of the Solar System and the Periodic Table which she had specially had printed for the occasion which she used during her talk. As we all sat around in a circle under the stars Susan started with some basic facts about the universe, galaxies, and stars including distances, what they are made of, how they are formed, what stages they undergo etc. She used the Periodic Table to explain the elements that both humans and stars are made of and explained the physics of black holes and the chemistry of supernovas. Her knowledge about all these different aspects of astronomy was extensive and she had all sorts of facts and figures at her fingertips, including looking up all the distances in km which she had pre-converted to miles and temperature in Celsius to Farenheit. It was obvious that she had had put a lot of time and effort into preparing.
Susan then gave us a tour of the night sky by pointing out stars like Betlegeuse in the constellation Orion, Alpha Centauri which is the brightest star in our sky, The planet Jupiter and of course the Southern Cross. The moon was rather bright so we couldn't see as well as we had wished but we could still see the Milky Way and several globular clusters which we observed through binoculars. Once again after Orion almost set , Scorpio rose and Susan gave us lots of interesting information on how the constellations have been named and passed down in history from the Sumerians, to the ancient Greeks and Romans to the Arabs, through the Enlightenment and finally the present day.
As it was getting later and later students slowly left and walked to their tents until in the end only a handful of us were left. Irene, Kaitlyn and Donato were the last few to leave and they along with many others seemed to really enjoy the experience. I would imagine they will remember this for a while. As for me, if I could, I would have kept Susan there all night but sadly our time together had to end sometime as we bid her farewell with promises for 'us chickens', which is how she referred to people, to keep in touch.
A truly truly memorable night - so appropriate for May the Fourth.
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