The Stars Are Going Out

OUR STAR PARTY coordinator made the sad announcement on Tuesday that this year's Twin Lakes Star Party, the twenty-fifth, will be the last. TLSP has been one of the most enjoyable events sponsored by the West Kentucky Amateur Astronomers, and it is not the first star party that has ceased to operate in recent years.

Why, my wife asked me at dinner that evening, have these star parties been disappearing? I gathered my thoughts to try to give some answers. She knows, having been head of a volunteer humane society, one of those answers. Star parties are run by volunteers, and in these sorts of organizations, the same people volunteer year in and year out. Eventually they wear out or their time is taken up by other matters.

Finally the problem is lack of new, young blood in amateur astronomy. And there are many reasons for fewer young people becoming interested, not all of them having to do with video games competing for their attention. More than half of America's population now lives in congested areas where the night sky is barely visible. I believe a wondrous dark sky full of stars and a visible Milky Way make as many converts to astronomy as our heroic efforts to show interesting sky objects to the public on planetarium nights and at other public outreach events. And telescopes themselves may be so good that, paradoxically, they become part of the problem. One of my friends got into astronomy sixty years ago by grinding his own 4-1/4-inch mirror for a telescope he then assembled. That time and effort invested him in amateur astronomy. And the time many of us have spent in pushing scopes around while star-hopping to things we wanted to see—that was time we spent learning the sky. You don’t learn the sky that way if a computer takes you to your target. My point is that lifelong amateur astronomers come from the ranks of people who find the night sky marvelous whether or not a telescope is anywhere around.