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 Ģ������ƵStories      May 21, 2025

By Shane Ryden

Ģ������Ƶ astronomers brought stargazers of all ages to the Cashiers plateau earlier this spring where the night burned bright for the 13th annual Statewide Star Party.

Every year, the North Carolina Science Festival invites more than 40 groups of educators to delve into different, stellar subjects with their community, and this year’s topic was “Your Place in Space.”

Volunteers from the Boys and Girls Club of the Plateau and WCU’s chemistry and physics department collaborated on the evening’s activities, leading participants through hands-on explorations of the solar system and broader universe.  

Ģ������Ƶprofessor of astronomy, Enrique Gomez, read stories of the cosmos to the young and young at heart and led the group on a solar system walk, using models to illustrate the size and grandeur of our corner of the universe.

“We have hosted events for the NC Science Festival since its inception in 2011, and we have often been the westernmost event of the festival. The statewide star party involved dozens of sites on the same weekend in April, and we strive to bring the experience of science in a way that is accessible and enjoyable to all demographics and all ages,” Gomez said.

In addition to offering his wisdom to the public, Gomez invited future educators to attend, as well as passionate club members and Ģ������Ƶstudents who see the night sky as something to share.

Adam Bryant, a second-year science education major and founder of the Catamount Astronomy Club, sees something special and deeply human in the act of stargazing.

“The thing I always love about events tailored around astronomy, especially astronomy that’s looking through telescopes, pointing out constellations, having people ask questions of all sorts from all levels is on those sorts of nights, a lot of the baggage and the titles and the worries and the things that you have all kind of drift away, and you’re just there enjoying nature with other people,” Bryant said.

“You take yourself out of the stream of the rat race and experience wonder. You slow down a little bit, and you go from caring about what you just saw on social media or the TV or what your friend said, to staring through the eyepiece at the craters of the moon or a star-forming region 1500 light-years away, birthing stars over the course of millennia … You’re hearing constellation stories that have been passed down for millennia ever since mankind has been telling those stories.”

For most of the evening, Bryant stood beside his personal Newtonian reflector, a device closer in appearance to a mortar than a hobbyist’s telescope, and invited attendees to wander the sky at their leisure.

“By the end of the star party, I was letting kids control my telescope. They got to point out Jupiter and the moon and the Pleiades star cluster,” Bryant said.

Astronomy invites its own special curiosity, Bryant described. “It’s important because it lets wonder into a life that’s mundane,” he said.

“You’re always going to see things like Orion and Vega and Jupiter. You’re always going to see them, one way or another. But the more you find out about them, the more you learn about them over the course of the rest of your life, then every time you look at them, it’s going to be slightly different.

“Every single time you learn about it, you look at it in the sky and go, ‘I didn’t know that about you,’ and it kind of builds on itself.

“All the constellations have their season. Orion is in the sky when the leaves are not on the trees, Scorpius barely scrapes over the southern horizon in June and July, and August, you barely get to see them. But when you’re seeing them, it’s a special thing.”

Western North Carolina is getting brighter with the rest of the world. More and more lights across the continent mean less dark skies.

“We live in a society that’s basically one of the first societies to be nearly fully separated from the natural night and constellations,” Bryant said.

While life might not require that we know the stars as well as our ancestors, the more that we do learn of our place in the universe, the greater our appreciation for its scale and our small place within it.

Ģ������Ƶand its next generation of science educators reminded the world this year that our days don’t end when the sky gets dark.

“At the end of the day, it’s the night. The day’s not over yet. There’s something else you can do. It’s a clear night, and a clear night is full of possibility.”