The Astronomy of Now
Reflections on a fading sky culture, Know the Night, and Paschal Moons
Hello Stargazers and Forest-Walkers,
It was such a pleasure to get to see some of you in person on the new moon at our Know the Night event.
We sold out the evening, made a lot of s’mores, sat under some beautiful skies, sang some songs, played some games, and went on a little fairy walk. Here are some photos of the evening, thanks to my lovely partner:
I am so elated with how the night showed up and the clouds cleared for us, presenting the big dipper, Orion, Gemini, Jupiter, Mars, airplanes, and satellites. And I’m also elated with how many of you showed up for the night and this big event in this unfamiliar place. Thank you!
I learned a lot about how this event can change when the host location changes, and I’m excited to use this information to keep exploring potential futures for events like this. We’re definitely in discussions for holding this event again in the fall, and planning for next year, and I have some ideas for exploring more options on the mainland.
For those who were unable to make it, we shared this poem from Wendell Berry, and I hope you can find a moment for it at some point in the next month - maybe during the next new moon (April 27):
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Computus Paschalis
You can’t study cultural astronomy for very long before falling down a calendar rabbithole, as one would be hard-pressed to find a calendrical tradition that doesn’t depend in some way on marking the passage of time with the sun and the moon.
This month, we come upon Christianity’s most famous lunar holiday - Easter. The common rule is that Easter occurs on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the March equinox. However, it gets a lot more complicated than that, and quite quickly.
In the field of cultural astronomy there are many biblical scholars, and as a pagan raised by atheists, I can confidently say that I’m not one of them. But even though I can’t do it justice, I have enough of an obsession with calendars to share that there is a LONG liturgical history surrounding how the dates of Easter are actually computed, by whom, and how that can differ from one tradition to another. For example, the Eastern Orthodox tradition calculates Easter based off of the Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian. Furthermore, the ecclesiastical date of the equinox, which has been designated as March 21st, may differ from the actual astronomical date, which may occur as early as March 19th - it’s a small difference, but it can change the Easter date by up to a month if the full moon is very near. Easter is also traditionally linked to Passover in the Hebrew calendar, due to the stories of the holiday, but concerted efforts were made to distance Roman churches from depending on the Hebrew calendar. The whole business of this math is often called “Computus Paschalis”, or just “Computus.”
Today, as I’m publishing this in North America, it is that very Paschal full moon - but it technically falls on a Sunday for many Europeans, so Easter will be next Sunday. Because of this rule, Easter can never coincide with a lunar or solar eclipse.
As a side note, this full moon is also a “micromoon”, meaning the moon is just a little bit further away from us than usual. (Its orbit isn’t a perfect circle - they hardly ever are.)
Current Sky Connections
This month I wanted to write about the academic course I just took on Chinese Astrology. I also wanted to write about the differences between sidereal and tropical astrology. But most of all, I felt compelled to write about the cultural astronomy of the present moment, and about the changing state of what sky connection looks like in the United States right now. But I have to admit, it has been difficult.
Some folks here may know that prior to sliding into the world of Outdoor Education, I enjoyed seven years of working for Seattle’s Museum of Flight as an Educator. While I was there, I made many friends and connections within museums, planetariums, science centers, NASA, JPL, and NOAA.
Earlier this month, some colleagues were discussing in a forum what cuts they were already facing. They mentioned the cancellation of sold-out talks because the scientist speaking suddenly had no funds available for travel. The mentioned receiving messages from accomplished minorities at other institutions, stating they no longer worked there. They mentioned dark sky talks at national parks being cancelled. They mentioned schools cancelling undergraduate research positions because of dramatic cuts to the National Science Foundation, and especially severe cuts for any program aimed at supporting underrepresented students. They mentioned summer school programs for migrant families in jeopardy, and school groups with funding from Title 1 and Native American affairs offices no longer able to participate in astronomy programs. They mentioned grants from NASA specifically for astronomy outreach being frozen. They mentioned capital campaigns for building planetariums, frozen and delayed due to tariff costs. And this was all before the massive cuts to the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
For a few weeks, I felt it was my duty to try to write this piece of this newsletter about this moment in cultural astronomy. I felt someone had to document it. And I had every intention of doing so. But with the veritable blitz of information and my very limited free time, it has been almost impossible to bring any standard of journalism to this article. One day, an agency is there, the next it’s gutted, and then there’s a legal battle, jobs are reinstated, but then it’s overturned, and there may or may not be funds. A website scrubs information, it draws critique, the information changes, and then it disappears entirely. I bookmark articles to reference one day, and the next, they’re irrelevant. Coming back to this piece right now, at my self-imposed deadline, I feel I must admit defeat. In this moment, I don’t have the time to be a good journalist. But maybe I can still write a decent reflection. This is a blog, after all, not the New York Times.
As a former aviation museum employee, something that struck me was the scrubbing and censorship of government websites, especially pertaining to the Women Airforce Service Pilots, the Tuskegee Airmen, and the Enola Gay.
I spent a lot of years teaching Girl Scouts about the Women Airforce Service Pilots, and how during World War II, these women earned their pilot licenses, ferried planes right off the assembly line from one military airport to another around the country, and towed targets for men to shoot at. Though they were never allowed to fight, they performed incredibly risky jobs, and suffered more than one fatality, and have spent an incredibly long time fighting for recognition and preserving their history.
Prior to WWII, no black man had been permitted to train as a military pilot, and it took decades of advocacy and the pressure of war to finally change this. Even so, segregation dictated that these men stick together under the purview of white officers. Black officers were trained separately, and the standards they were held to were often much higher than those of their white counterparts. Airman Coleman Young (later the mayor of Detroit) said of the experience, “They made the standards so high, we actually became an elite group. We were screened and super-screened. We were unquestionably the brightest and most physically fit young blacks in the country. We were super-better because of the irrational laws of Jim Crow.” The Tuskeegee Airmen, thus named because they were all trained out of Tuskeegee, Alabama, formed several very successful combat units in WWII.
In all of these stories, though, it’s the flagging of the Enola Gay that I find most ridiculous, mostly because this is what happens when you let AI scrub your website and archives. Clearly, the AI was trying to get rid of any information that could link the military to LGBTQIA folks. In doing so, it scrubbed the name of the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, simply because it was named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of pilot Paul Tibbets.
Earlier this month, we also saw massive cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), amid large storms in the middle of the country. A meteorologist on Facebook asked his followers for kindness in the face of an incredible amount of pressure. He shared that their forecasts might not be as accurate as usual, due to a reduction in force and in data. No sooner had he asked for kindness, than his comments were full of angry people telling him to just shut up and work overtime. Someone mockingly asked how weather balloon launches being cut in other parts of the country could affect his predictions in Appalachia. But of course, weather prediction doesn’t come out of nowhere. The models meteorologists use only work because of data that is continuously collected at multiple points. Less data means a weaker overall model, which means less accurate predictions.
And then, of course, there’s NASA. Not only has the website scrubbed many of its prominent women and deleted all of its PR moves for Project Artemis (which aimed to put the first woman and person of color on the moon, among many other projects) - no, no. The plan is to cut NASA’s funding in half.
Having worked in the aerospace education field for a while, I know the arguments against space funding aren’t new. “Why are we going to the moon at all when there are people who can’t eat and who are suffering genocides here on Earth?” And you know what? I totally understand that viewpoint, and I kind of agree. For a very long time, American advances in space travel have had primarily political, colonial, nationalist, and war-faring aims.
However, I’ve also been in the space field long enough to know that a huge number of us space-lovers are just philosophers, poets, and nerds. We read Carl Sagan, and we marvel about how vast our universe is, and we try to solve its mysteries because it is our beautiful, cosmic religion. I can guarantee that the majority of the people sending robots to Mars are doing so, not because they imagine better living on Mars, but because they want our incredible robot science labs to look at some cool rocks so we can discover more about the building blocks of our solar system and learn more about how we came to be on such an incredible planet.
I could make a lot of arguments for space travel. I could argue that advances made by NASA are enjoyed by people all over the world doing very non-NASA things. I could argue that going to the moon and sending the Voyager probes out of the solar system are the most incredible things we’ve ever done as a species. I could argue that our near-Earth research is imperative to keeping Earth a safer, more informed place. But the truth is that after making these arguments for many years, I realized that the age of Sagan’s aerospace was over, and the reign of corporate aerospace was here.
One of my favorite programs at the museum was the Challenger Learning Center, created by the families of the seven astronauts who lost their lives on the Challenger, to honor their memory. I have a close connection to the story, which we can explore in another blog post, and I loved continuing Christa McAuliffe’s and Barbara Morgan’s Teacher In Space mission, and meeting Dottie Metcalf-Lindenberger, who followed in their footsteps. These simulated missions put students on imaginary trips to Mars and the Moon with courses to navigate, experiments to run, and emergencies to solve. But in later years, funding sources changed, and missions became advertisements for corporate aerospace companies, owned and operated by billionaires running their engineers ragged. This definitely wasn’t the only factor behind my pivot away from rockets and rovers in favor of the natural world, but it was one of many.
At first, I thought it was pretty obvious that the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” run by Elon Musk was given an alarming amount of access to NASA in order to make room for more private spaceflight contracts, which would serve him very well, thank you. But in recent days, even Musk has been having some feelings about NASA’s budget and contract cuts. It seems like maybe this isn’t a win for SpaceX after all. But who could it possibly be a win for? Certainly not science. (You can read the open SOS letter from scientists around the country.)
Ultimately, I don’t think I would mind a cut to NASA funding if it meant the careful reallocation of those funds to worthy causes, and the careful re-evaluation of NASA priorities to focus on pushing the envelope on planetary research for the good of all, like the stewardship of our public lands. As the famous showtune from Good News refrains,
“The moon belongs to everyone—
The best things in life are free
The stars belong to everyone
They gleam there for you and me”
But of course, that is not the case. Our public lands are also under attack, with threats to national parks, outdoor education funding in Washington, and national forests (look into the America First Policy Institute if you want a nasty shock). This newsletter is about the sky, so I don’t need to go into too much detail here - but I will say my partner and I visited a national park this week, and the power went out while we were standing in the museum. Trash service was also gone. As it turns out, when the government pulls all the money off their expense cards, parks can’t pay bills.
Let me try to bring this back to the sky. In the grand scheme of things, through colonization, disease, attrition, and more, we have already lost so many of our own cultural heritage stories about the sky. We are now in a moment where we are beginning to lose access to the official records of the American culture’s sky stories. We stand to lose a lot more.
My ask is that you go outside and look up. And that when you see the moon, you give yourself a moment to think about how people went there. And if you see Mars hanging out next to Castor and Pollux in Gemini, you think for a moment about how we’ve sent a handful of rovers there, and how they’ve sent us pictures of another world. And maybe, you think a little bit about your life, and what it has been like to receive stories of the sky from your parents, teachers, children, and favorite authors. And you know, calling your representatives would be great too. ;)
That’s it for this month, folks.
If you like drones, then you might want to browse Silent Running. Before WALL-E or Star Wars, it featured adorable bots in space.