 |
 |
||
 |
|
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||||||
 |
Space Topics: Planetary AnalogsStars Above, Earth BelowAstronomy and Space Exploration in America's National Parks
|
||||||||
The Milky Way over Yosemite National Park
The Milky Way from Glacier Point in Yosemite National Park. The lights of Yosemite Village light up the valley floor. This image was made by the National Park Services Night Sky Team to measure and monitor light pollution within Yosemite National Park. Credit: Dan Duriscoe and Chad Moore, National Park Service |
So begins a story told by Maria Solares to ethnographer J. P. Harrington over the course of several interviews in the 1920s. Solares was an elderly woman of the Inezeno Chumash tribe, from the Central California coast. Her story is summarized in E. C. Krupp's wonderful book, Beyond the Blue Horizon. It is a strange and bizarre account of blind ghosts, fierce birds who pluck out human eyes, and a menacing gate-keeper called the Scorpion Woman. There’s a precarious crossing of a monster-infested sea by means of a single pole that bounces and sways, threatening to hurl our protagonists to their doom. The story culminates in the young couple reaching Shimilaqsha, the beautiful, eternal City of the Dead. The poor husband competes for the chance to stay forever with his young bride, but fails in the end, and so returns to Earth to tell us of all he has seen and lost.
While this is a tale from the Chumash, Krupp says that the nearby Miwok tribe of Yosemite Valley told a similar tale of a young husband and doomed bride journeying the Paths of the Dead. Through the stories of Solares, ethno-astronomers Travis Hudson and Ernest Underhay posit in their book Crystals in the Sky that the travelogue is actually an account of shape, structure, and constellations found along the band of the Milky Way, which we can still see at night in summer and fall. Beginning with the enormous "W"-shaped constellation of Cassiopeia, visible high along the path of the Milky Way in late summer, one can piece together a plausible correspondence between monsters and stars, rock chasms and interstellar dust clouds. At the end, the story reaches the fair eternal city Shimilaqsha in the form of Altair, a star in the constellation of Aquila, found nearly a hemisphere away along the Milky Way, just beyond the great black rift in the constellation of Cygnus.
The Milky Way over Yosemite Valley
From Ahwahnee Meadow within Yosemite Valley I can easily imagine the Milky Way arcing overhead as a path for the dead. From Glacier Point at the right, across Half Dome at center and ending at Royal Arches at the left, the path of the Milky Way is stunning even under the current lighting conditions that illuminate the valley walls. Jupiter is the bright star at lower right, while a meteor streaks through the sky beneath it. Credit: Tyler Nordgren |
By the time Maria Solares could tell Harrington this story, the Chumash shamans from whom she had heard it as a child were long dead. Details and knowledge of its true meaning and significance were long gone. But sitting along the banks of the Merced River in Yosemite National Park, it is intriguing to think of this story and identify its possible correspondence to what I see overhead.
Today, Yosemite is probably where most Californians see the Milky Way for the first time. San Francisco is only about three hours' drive away; Los Angeles is seven. On a Friday night in May, at the start of the summer tourist season, the stream of cars entering the valley is nearly non-stop. Even at 3:00 a.m., I am hard-pressed to find a four-minute period in which headlights from entering cars do not pass through my nighttime photographs. The sheer number of visitors to the densely packed Yosemite Valley creates its own artificial glow at night. In summer, nearly 20,000 people a day enter the park, with the vast majority heading to the attractions of Half Dome, El Capitan, and Yosemite Falls, all within the confines of the narrow valley.
Yet, just 1,000 meters above the crowds, Glacier Point is a major site within the national park system for amateur astronomy. Peter Lord, director of the Island Astronomy Institute (a non-profit astronomy and night-sky preservation group outside Acadia National Park in Maine) told me that it was a night at Glacier Point that made him “convinced astronomy belongs in the national parks.” The store at Glacier Point is the first I have seen in the park with extensive astronomical merchandise (including T-shirts, star maps, and shot glasses).
Starry night shopping at Glacier Point
Astronomy is good business at the Glacier Point Store. Credit: Tyler Nordgren |
While the night sky from Yosemite Valley is not the darkest sky I have seen within the park system (Big Bend still wins in that regard), the number of astronomical activities that take place starting in June makes it a premier destination for anyone wishing to get away and see the sky the way it used to be. Evening astronomy programs occur in the Valley nearly every night. Glacier Point plays host to evening programs each weekend, when where local astronomy clubs typically set up telescopes. The park’s Yosemite Today paper will have more up-to-date information. In addition, if you are planning your visit to Yosemite a year in advance, I will be speaking on astronomy within the parks at LeConte Memorial Lodge, Friday, June 26th, 2009.
Next week I head back to Chaco Culture National Historical Park to take part in a teacher workshop and then head to Bryce Canyon National Park to look more closely at amateur astronomy within the parks. Bryce Canyon’s Eighth Annual Astronomy Festival takes place June 25 to 28; my talk will be in the visitor center on June 27.
[ what is this? ]