Wrap up warm, go outside and look up at the night sky. Leave the binoculars and telescopes behind initially, just use your eyes and become a little more familiar with the stars and planets. Look up until you find your curiosity is awakened by a star, a planet, a shooting star or a galaxy. At this stage, get out your optical instruments!
This was the advice given to our U3A group by the astronomer in residence at the Scottish Dark Sky Observatory, near Dalmellington.
We should stargaze, we were informed, because it is good for our well-being: throughout the history of humankind, our ancestors have looked to the night skies for inspiration, for guidance, for navigation and for perspective.
The Galloway Forest Park has the accolade of being the first Dark Sky Park in Europe: a status granted to regions on account of low levels of light pollution. In Galloway we are privileged to have access to some of the darkest and therefore paradoxically, the brightest skies in the UK. However the Galloway skies also have plenty of cloud, so we queried in the minibus on our way to the Observatory, what the 34 percentage cloud cover prediction given for our evening actually meant and whether we would see anything of the night sky at all?
Our queries were answered an hour later as we stood on the observatory platform, shivering with cold and gazing a bank of cloud above the horizon to which the green laser beam of our astronomer pointed. For the cloud suddenly dissipated and there in its place, was the Red Planet, Earths nearest neighbour and probably the most studied object in the Universe, Mars.
A quick finger on a computer screen and the giant reflecting telescope obediently moved and set sight on our neighbouring planet. We queued to take a peep down the eyepiece and gaze in awe at the image of Mars, tinged with reddish orange colour.
Our astronomer’s green laser then pointed out Vega, the second brightest star in the Northern Celestial hemisphere. The star, twice the mass of the Sun and much studied by astrophysicists and astronomers, glinted diamond-like when viewed through the eyepiece.
“If Vega is much bigger than our sun, why does it not look much bigger when we view it through the telescope?” was one the question posed by members of our group.
“Vega is 25 light years away from our nearest star, the sun” replied our astronomer. “That is the distance a beam of light could travel in 25 years and light can cover a distance of 300,000,000 metres in just one second.” I will leave you to do the calculation.
The green laser of the astronomer swept across the Milky way galaxy. Most of the stars here, we were told, unlike our sun are in pairs or binaries.
With the naked eye, these star systems looked like single points of light but when viewed through the telescope or a good pair of binoculars, the image often resolves and two points of light can be seen.
The green laser pointed back towards Vega and on to the Double Double, a star system named Epsilon Lyra in the constellation of Lyra, 162 light years distant).
Then came the highlight of the trip for me: the Double Double with my naked eye looked like a point of light or just possibly two points very close to each other. When viewed through the telescope, the image resolved beautifully into four points of light. Wow!
This felt like real astronomy!
I intend to add more sparkle to my winter nights and star gaze even more. How about you?
Many thanks to the organisers of this trip to the stars and especially to Stephen Bullock our driver.
Christine Mayson