GALAXIES ABOVE EAST COUNTY Living a Life Beneath the Stars of Heaven
	NOVEMBER 2005

by Charles F. Hagar
Photos by Russell Byrne

I’m one of the lecturers at the recently refurbished planetarium at LMC (Los Medanos College), which features a 400 thousand dollar projector, called the Chronos, that is capable of displaying more stars than the naked eye can actually see. It is a superior device for projecting dramatic, completely realistic views of the heavens, and can display a naked eye view of the stars from remote areas and times. It will depict the starry heavens, for example, as seen in 2,000 BC from the viewpoint of someone standing on the beach at Waikiki or on the top of a Swiss alp in the year AD 4,000.

The planetarium is recapturing a blessing long denied to us suburbanites. Ancient man could look up at the star fields above his head — unshadowed by the reflections of city lights or by the pollutions of civilization — and be dumbstruck or even moved to worship by the beauties of the undimmed heavens with their gathered and splashed-about splendors. “The heavens declare the glory of God” is an outburst the full effect of which is lost upon us because the stars over our heads these days shine with only a small part of the brilliance with which they formerly bathed our earthly skies.

Galaxies Like Grains of Sand
However, when it comes to marveling at stars, technology is able to give more to us on one hand than the effects of technology have ever taken from us on the other. Climb to the top of any hill with even a small pair of binoculars and on a clear night you can see ten times more stars than the ancient people ever knew existed. We now know that the stars are actually massed together in clotted mounds and heaps into galaxies like drifts of snow in a boundless winterscape.

Our sun is one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy. The Mt. Palomar 200-inch telescope can view more than a million galaxies just within the bowl of the Big Dipper. It can view galaxies of stars that appear smaller in our skies than a virus would appear to the naked eye if it were 4,000 miles away.

And of course a couple decades ago the Hubble Space Telescope began to return pictures from deep space of unbelievable resolution and beauty. A technology called Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), has revealed stars so far away that their light took more than 13 billion years to reach earth. These distant objects shine with only one four-billionth of the brightness of stars that can be seen with the naked eye.

Our universe is not only large beyond the ability of our minds to comprehend, but astronomers are discovering that the universe also embodies complexities that were unimagined by people in the past and almost unimaginable by we who call ourselves scientific. In 1650, for example, an astronomer named Christian Huygens was the first to discover that Saturn was encircled by rings but until the first space probe took close-up pictures of them in 1979, nobody ever imagined that the rings had arranged themselves in an intricate series of grooves resembling an LP phonograph record.

Not only was the discovery of such intricacy unexpected, no astronomer would have previously admitted such complexity to be possible. Even today, though they suspect that a set of “shepherd moons” is responsible for maintaining the unimaginably complicated structures, astrophysicists still can’t create the formulas and algorithms that would actually explain how the rings could have come into existence.

The Saturn ring system is only one of the impossibly complex structures of this universe in which we live. A hundred years ago astronomers would have scoffed at any theory about neutron stars, which have a mass equal to our sun but are the size of San Francisco. The gravity in these incredibly dense bodies is great enough to squeeze the structure out of the atoms and the whole object becomes a bizarre ball of neutrons. One of these neutron stars, in a globular cluster called 47 Tucanae, spins on its axis once every 2.35 milliseconds, which means that the star goes through one-and-a-half million “days” every hour.

Pre-scientific people never suspected that the Sun, which appears in our earth’s sky to be exactly the same size as the moon, is actually large enough to contain 1,300,000 earths. Astronomers have now discovered that the huge circle of the sun is an insignificant dust mite compared to such stars as VV Cephei, which has sufficient volume to enclose more than a billion suns the size of ours. If it replaced our sun, VV Cephei would enclose all of the planets in our solar system out to Saturn within its massive girth.

Even though VV Cephei shines 10,000 times brighter than our sun, it is a dim lamp wick compared to the really bright stars. The brightest stars in the universe are called LBVs (luminous blue variables). A star with the catchy name, LBV 1806-20 shines more than 40 times brighter than VV Cephei, which makes it 400 thousand times more brilliant than our sun. If our sun and LBV 1806-20 were placed side by side, the comparison would be like a firefly next to the arc of an acetylene-welding torch.

An Early Thirst to Know
Since I was a child I wanted to learn as much as possible about the amazing universe we live in. When I was five years old my dad took me to the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles (near the Hollywood sign). It was one of the first planetariums in the country. I went to a star show that night and afterwards gazed through a telescope at the pockmarked face of the moon. That night I developed a fascination with the universe that has lasted my entire life.

During the latter part of Junior High, I began taking monthly treks to Griffith Park to see the current star show. When I was a Junior in high school, the Director called me aside during one of my visits and told me something that changed my life. “We have an opening for a guide,” he said. I took the job without a moment’s hesitation. Even though I was young, I was big for my age and had no problem taking my place as the only high schooler among the team of college students who normally served as guides.

One of our jobs was guiding latecomers through the darkness to their seats in the theater. “Link hands going through the double doors,” we would tell them. We were all interested in any pretty girls, because we could offer to hold their hands as we led them through the darkness. I was eventually offered the position of Head Guide and had a dozen people working under me. I continued in the position for five years until graduating from UCLA — with a major in Astronomy, of course.

During my senior year at UCLA I was promoted as one of the Griffith Planetarium lecturers. This was no small honor because I was working side-by-side with astronomers like George Abell, the guiding power behind the “Abell Catalogue,” which ultimately listed about 4,000 clusters of galaxies and provided astronomers with a usable map of the universe.

Bay Area Star Views
I came to Northern California in 1957 because I grew tired of LA and weary of the ubiquitous smog that smothers that place 26 days a month. I also moved so that I could finish my graduate work at Berkeley. I completed my Masters Degree and took some PhD work. During that time I also got involved in the program at the Morrison Planetarium in Golden Gate Park.

I joined the staff of Morrison Planetarium and served as Associate Manager through 1960. I gave lectures and helped produce the shows. I got the job because I had known the manager, George Bunton, when he worked at Griffith. George was a consummate manager. He was a real technician, and helped put the finishing touches on a new star projector that the Morrison engineers designed for their own use.

In the fall of 1960, I took the position of astronomy instructor at San Francisco State. I retired in June of 1994, taught part-time until 2003, and then moved to Summerset Orchard in Brentwood. I quickly discovered the planetarium at LMC and got in touch with the place through Kate Boisvert, who I had known as a fellow-student at Berkeley.

Some Planetariums these days deliver Hollywood-like “canned” presentations and simply play taped shows for the audience. They hire a Hollywood actor like Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart, for example, to make the presentation. Obviously, the effect is to turn a star show into a “star” show, and to provide a theatrical experience rather than a genuine science encounter. Does Patrick Stewart know a globular cluster from a planetary nebula? It doesn’t matter, because he’s just reading some script that other people have written for him. I feel that such slick productions trade the fascinating study of astronomy for a merely entertaining Star-Trek kind of entertainment.

Planetariums, like our LMC facility, have a more homegrown do-your-own-thing style. Anyway, its fun personally to share with people the love that I have for astronomy, so at our LMC planetarium we play some background music, read appropriate poetry, talk about legends of the sky — such as the stories of the Big Dipper and the North Star — and try to engage people in the wonderful study of the stars. And, of course, unlike Patrick Stewart, we’re available to answer questions. If my dad had taken his 5-year-old to see a video narrated by some movie star on that fateful night, I might have ended up selling cars for a living.

Kate Boisvert plays the role of director in the LMC planetarium pagent. She got her degree from Cal and has been at LMC for 30 years. She directs the astronomy program and also received a prize for developing a course in humanities, called “The Origin and Evolution of the Universe,” which surveys versions of origins from religions and science. During each semester in this course, Kate dresses up as Galileo to dramatically illustrate his famous conflict with the Church.”

My personal views of the origins of the universe are expressed in an old gospel song.

How big is God! How big and wide his vast domain!
To try and tell these lips could only start.
He’s big enough to rule His mighty universe
Yet small enough to live within my heart.

What a marvelous universe we inhabit! Come by and see the show. Call LMC for show times (925-439-2181 X800).