Bruce Waters

23:15

We had a lovely evening with a 1 hour program (45 minute talk and 13 minutes for questions)

Over 70 people showed up with blankets or beach chairs for a relaxing and intimate evening under the stars! It started off with a lovely kick-off from a Perseid bolide/fireball – a meteor brighter than Venus (magnitude -4.5). It traveled from 30 degrees above the Northeast horizon and ended about 45 degrees over the northwest horizon. What a show!

We had fun with the audience by getting them involved early. We asked them if they had seen or had any experiences with any bears, loons, sandhill cranes or had heard the shill cry of the fisher cat. This led us into a discussion that for thousands of years, people have gathered around sacred places (campfires, waterfalls, beaches, etc,) to share stories and pass on their culture from one generation to the next. Part of that cultural tradition was to learn about the patterns of stars in the sky so that people could navigate as well as create calendars. And, as a useful aid to remembering those patterns as well as an opportunity to teach the morals of the society, their animals and mythical stories were placed into the sky to form the constellations. This led to pointing out the traditional constellations as well as many Ojibwe constellations. The latter, I am very careful to not delve into the stories and only point out the constellations in a respectful manner.

We then went on to talk about who had traveled the furthest to come to Killarney (there was a family from France, so they won)! We used that as a jumping point to discuss the distances to stars and to use the summer triangle to prove that the brightness of a star does NOT indicate its distance because some stars are intrinsically more massive and, therefore, fusing atoms at a more prodigious rate to fight back against the gravity trying to crush them. These stars, such as Deneb, will fuse hydrogen to helium, then helium to carbon and oxygen and so on and so on, producing nitrogen, sulfur, silicon, magnesium, sodium, etc until they produce iron.

We then talked about how when the star produces iron, its come to the end of the road and will then crush itself into a supernova, releasing most of its mass outwards in a giant shockwave. This shockwave then crashes into the stationary interstellar gas clouds, condensing those clouds into new balls of gas that become stars. Thus, out of the deaths of old stars, new stars are formed.

We then talked about the sand and rocks found in Killarney Provincial Park, which has some of the most interesting geology found anywhere in the world! The silicate rocks that have been ground down into the beach sand that they were sitting on was created from the silicon and oxygen found in the stars. The hemoglobin in their blood is based on iron. That iron comes from the final stages of a massive star’s life.

The word “Cosmos” stems from the ancient Greek word for order, good government and the universe. The word “Chaos” comes from the ancient Greek word for gap or void. Our Universe was born from out of the void and, in that process, has created stars that, through billions of years, has formed life on the Earth. “As we go back to our campfires, remember that All of those sitting around the beach are connected as brothers and sisters to each other as well as all other life on Earth and thank you for experiencing that at Killarney Provincial Park!

Tonight, at 22:00, will be a beachside chat and interactive program (no slides nor observing aids) other than smartphones on the connection between the Cosmos, Killarney Park and the visitor. We will be touching on a wide variety of subjects but the goal will be to have a strong sense of purpose in why we teach astronomy in Provincial Parks – will let you know how it goes tomorrow!