ROBERT J. CUMMINGS PHOTO
Bedford Garden Club members and others gathered at Ward Pound Ridge for a stargazing event.
By JOYCE CORRIGAN
It was a marvelous night for a moon gaze when a hearty group of 15 participants, ages 8 to 80, braved 20 degree weather to channel their inner Galileo and trekked to an ice-patched clearing outside of the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation Trailside Museum.
Tuesday, Feb. 4, was the Bedford Garden Club’s first “Stargazing” event, part of their ongoing nature series. Led by Yale astrophysicist Nicholas Lombardo, this “wow-look-at-that!” experience was, for many, their first close encounter with the moon, the stars and other heavenly bodies the Greeks and Romans named after their favorite gods several millennia ago.
“Back in June, I suggested Feb. 4 because of the predicted viewability of Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn,” Lombardo explained, “and partly because the moon was just about in its first quarter phase.” (Civilian translation: half-moon phase.) “When shadows from the moon’s mountains, valleys and craters are stretched and elongated they’re really a spectacle to see from Earth,” he added. “We also had easy viewing of the Orion Nebula.”
Garden club member Varner Redmon shared her own thrill of discovery.
“I never knew that Venus displays phases like the moon!” she said, adding, “What a treat to be outside observing our beautiful nocturnal, natural world.”
How easy it is to forget that planets whose names children memorize are right there above us in full view, albeit with a little help from the professional-grade telescopes Lombardo brought with him. In this case, a large Dobsonian, nicknamed the “light bucket” because of how efficiently it collects light from objects in the sky, and a smaller refractor telescope which is, he explained, “a much bigger version of the same telescope Galileo used when he discovered four of Jupiter’s moons in 1610.”
The event’s fantastical atmosphere was further enhanced by an otherworldly red-glow emanating from Lombardo’s red flashlights and headlamp. Any amount of white light from a phone or traditional flashlight substantially diminishes the human eye’s ability to observe objects in the night sky. The group actually met in a darkened Trailside Museum.
Beth Sachs and Emily Fisher, who head up the Bedford Garden Club’s nature series, seem to take a “to infinity and beyond” approach that ventures well beyond the garden.
“We’ve hiked bird migration areas led by Bedford Audubon’s Tait Johansson, insect walks led by naturalist Murray Fisher and studied tardigrades, the microscopic animals living on the trunks of trees, with Taro Letaka,” Sachs said. “An evening with an expert astronomer, studying the moon and stars, which have guided gardeners and farmers in planting for millennia, seemed fascinating, too.”
“Nick’s enthusiasm for astronomy was felt by all and he really explained things in terms everybody could understand,” Fisher said. “With the powerful telescopes he provided, we were able to see in detail some of the equipment left behind from a Moon mission!”
“It was a perfect February night where we could see everything with great clarity,” said Lombardo, who displayed an extraterrestrial superpower of his own by appearing comfortable through the evening, wearing only a denim jacket embellished with NASA patches. (The rest of the gathering was dressed for scaling Mount Everest). And safe to say, Lombardo’s conversation at cocktail parties is more memorable than most — particularly when he mentions being on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, known to have some of the clearest skies on the planet, and realizing that a shadow cast on the ground next to him was not by the moon, but by sunlight reflected off the clouds of Jupiter over 300 million miles away.
Interest in space and space travel has grown exponentially as of late. Scientists and engineers from NASA and their European and Chinese equivalents are working to expand our understanding of the universe and potentially provide solutions to global challenges such as climate change.
Lombardo defines himself as a “planetary climate scientist. Meaning I study the physics behind what makes a world hot or cold, wet or dry and windy or calm.” The focus of his Ph.D. at Yale has been on the atmosphere of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.
“I argue that Titan is the most Earth-like world in the solar system,” he said, “since like Earth, it has an atmosphere that’s made mostly of nitrogen.”
It is an “extremely interesting time” to be an astrophysicist, Lombardo continued. “If it were 4 billion years ago, during the Late Heavy Bombardment period, our observatories would continually be destroyed by the impact of massive asteroids on proto-Earth’s surface, and the data would never be fully calibrated. On the other hand, if we were 100 thousand billion years in the future, there would be no free hydrogen left to make new stars, and all the stars in the sky would just slowly go dark. We’re in quite a lucky time!”
A stargazing group at Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, led by Yale astrophysicist Nicholas Lombardo. ROBERT J. CUMMINGS PHOTOS