Blogs / Bad Astronomy

I love astronomy. Duh. But I really love getting out under a dark, moonless sky and seeing the stars spangled across the velvety sky. There’s just something special and wonderful about it. And if you can get to a truly dark site, it’s spectacular. The Milky Way becomes a vivid stream of stars and clouds, spattered with darker regions where interstellar dust blocks our view of the treasures behind.

But this view is becoming increasingly difficult to find, especially in the United States. Cities get bigger, sprawl spreads farther, and the lights people use fill the sky with a persistent and irritating glow. We’re losing touch with the sky.

That’s why Jennifer Barlow started National Dark Sky Week (with participation from the International Dark Sky Association), a week where people are encouraged to turn down or off their outside lights, and to get out under the night sky.

This touches all of us. I have many stories about this sort of thing (like this one, or this one) and I am always amazed and gratified to see how "normal" people react when they get to a really dark site for the first time.

With Dark Sky Week, maybe we can all make that experience a little easier for everyone.

I support skeptical groups, of course, and one of the best is the Center for Inquiry, a globally-based institution to promote critical thinking and rationalism. One of the first talks I gave after moving to California was at the CfI West center in Los Angeles, where I had a fantastic time and met lots of folks I still consider good friends.

CfI has a podcast called Point of Inquiry, and I did an interview with them last week which is now online. We talked about the Moon hoax and the usual stuff, but also why it’s important to be skeptical in today’s society, and why knowledge of science is so critical to our everyday lives.

I had fun on the interview (the interviewer, DJ Grothe, likes to play a gentle devil’s advocate to encourage the interviewee to make their points clearly). Right at the end I had an unusually lucid moment when discussing religion versus science:

Science is all about investigating what’s real and what isn’t… there is no knowledge forbidden to Man, there’s nothing we shouldn’t try to investigate at least, because we’ve got these big brains, and we’re very curious, and there’s a whole Universe out there for us to investigate. And I think that’s just tremendously exciting. I wake up every day and that breathes life into me; just to think that there’s so much out there we just don’t know, but that we may yet understand.

If you have never heard Point of Inquiry, go check it out. They have a long list of fantastic guests, and you’ll be happy you gave it a listen. Believe me.