Seeing Stars

I spent an evening this weekend at the Morehead Planetarium at UNC and would highly recommend a visit. We went to see the show “Carolina Skies,” which features the planets and stars that currently make up the night sky here in North Carolina.

As the lights dimmed, our designated star guide for the night asked if there were any questions. Probably expecting the standard “what are stars made of?” and “how far away is the sun?” she seemed a bit startled by the 6-year-old who asked if the machine in the middle of the room was R2-D2 (it was not, in fact, R2-D2, but rather the star projector).

The show got off to a bit of a shaky start, as the guide held up an inflatable globe, telling us this was a “small” model of the earth (really? not life-sized?) and when she realized midway through that she had forgotten to turn on the moon.

All in all, though, the show was great. I went into the night knowing a bit about celestial navigation from the time I spent at the Sea Education Association, but I learned a few new things too. And now, armed with my Carolina Skies star chart and a red light flashlight, I should be able to re-create the experience on a clear night at home!

Cocktail party trivia: Do you know what Subaru means and where the car’s logo comes from? 

It turns out that Subaru is the Japanese word for Pleiades, which is also known as the Seven Sisters – a cluster of stars (six or seven of which are visible to the naked eye from earth) in the constellation Taurus.