I’d Rather Be Stargazing

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Tom Urbain: I just remember coming out of the car and looking up at the sky, and my mind was blown by the fact that I could clearly see the Milky Way across the sky above me. And I had never seen that with my naked eyes before that. I actually, at this point in time, I didn't know that was even possible.[00:00:30] 

[00:00:38] Katya Rucker: Welcome to I'd Rather Be Stargazing, Episode 11 of the I'd Rather Be podcast. I'm your host, Katya, Rucker. Our passions have the power to connect us to something bigger than ourselves. And in the case of stargazing, we're exploring our connection with, literally, the entire universe. [00:01:00] The voice you just heard was Tom Urbain, a devoted stargazer based in the UK.

[00:01:07] About three years ago, Tom founded a website called starlust.org with the goal of making stargazing accessible and enjoyable to anyone, no technical or astronomical experience required. The site now receives 30,000 monthly visitors. And for good reason. If you have a question about space and what you might be able to see in [00:01:30] the sky, chances are, starlust.org has the answer.

[00:01:34] And that's because in his spare time, Tom is always researching and learning everything he can about space. And he's pondering the questions that connect to some of the biggest mysteries of the universe that humans may never learn the answer to. 

[00:01:49] Tom Urbain: What happened before the Big Bang? What was there? You know, it's -- how, how can you imagine something that isn't and then something that is? You know, I don't, I don't think our brains are [00:02:00] wired in a way that we can comprehend that, you know, something can come out of nothing. Like, what was there before the Big Bang? You know, that must have been something. And then if, if there was, what was it? Um, what's at the edge of the universe? You know, are we in a bubble or is the universe just infinite? Are there other universes that we don't know about, you know, different planes of existence?

[00:02:27] Katya Rucker: It's possible to discover a new [00:02:30] passion at any age, but for Tom, the drive to look up at the sky and ask questions about the stars and the planets seemed imprinted into his DNA from the very beginning. 

[00:02:41] Tom Urbain: I was a nineties kid. I grew up reading, like all the old space TV shows and movies like Star Wars and Star Trek. So I was already, you know, very, uh, very interested in, like science fiction and stuff like that. And most of those TV shows and movies happen in space, and Star Trek is all [00:03:00] about space exploration, new planets, you know, new alien species and stuff like that. So that was me growing up, you know, with my imagination, uh, very driven by space stuff basically.

[00:03:13] And, uh, stargazing in particular, you know, I would always look up and ask my dad, you know, what’s this star’s name and what's this and where, where's the moon and where where's the planets? 

[00:03:23] Katya Rucker: And then, about nine years ago, Tom fell even more in love with stargazing after a [00:03:30] particularly vivid experience he had in a rural area where much more of the night sky was visible, meaning unobstructed by light pollution, than his hometown.  

[00:03:39] Tom Urbain: I was invited to a friend's birthday at a cottage that was about two hours away, uh, from any cities in the deep countryside, in the south of France. And, uh, we arrived at the cottage and it was about two o'clock in the morning. Uh, I just remember coming out of the car and looking up at the sky and my [00:04:00] mind was blown by the fact that I could clearly see the Milky Way across this sky above me. And I had never seen that with my naked eyes before . Actually, at this point in time, I didn't know that was even possible. And it was just the most majestic view I've ever seen in my life. Like, the Milky Way right above me. I just didn't know that was possible. And you could clearly see the shape of it and like, a bit of the, um, like the dust bands and the shadows from the dust.

[00:04:29] [00:04:30] And like, the shape of it was uncanny. Like there was, there was nothing else like that, and it was beautiful. And, uh, you know, you know, eight, nine years later, I still haven't had the chance to see it again because of light pollution and where I'm based. But yeah, that, that clearly shocked me and that, you know, that's something that will stay with me forever. Like it was -- yeah, I was speechless for a good five minutes and all my friends were like, unpacking the car and getting into the cottage and I just [00:05:00] stayed there just looking at the sky. It was, oh yeah, it was beautiful.

[00:05:03] Katya Rucker: What strikes me about stargazing is how it pulls at two aspects of human nature that are often in opposition to one another. On the one hand, our love of beauty and the experience of being in the presence of something that can't fully be put into words. And on the other hand, our drive to use reason and the scientific method to pursue answers to phenomena we don't yet understand. Tom embraces both of [00:05:30] these qualities within himself.

[00:05:32] He can stand in awe of the Milky Way overhead, just taking in its beauty, but he remains on a constant quest to learn more about what is happening in space. 

[00:05:42] Tom Urbain: The most, uh, important trait about me and this hobby is how curious I am. Like, I am constantly looking for answers. I almost need to know the answer. I always want to know how things work. And I always like, research how things work. [00:06:00] Um, and also, like, I love mysteries. Uh, you know, there's lots of things that happen up there in the night sky that we don't fully understand, uh, black holes being one. And I, I just really want to know how all those things work. It, it really drives my passion, that we've got those mysteries we are trying to solve.

[00:06:22] Katya Rucker: I asked Tom if there's a specific mystery that intrigues him the most, since for some stargazers the big question is whether there [00:06:30] is intelligent life out there, while for others, it might be predicting when the death of a star, a supernova explosion is going to happen. Tom's answer was the thing he just mentioned offhand -- black holes -- the only known objects that defy the laws of nature, and that cannot even be directly observed with a telescope.  

[00:06:52] Tom Urbain: As soon as you go into a black hole, all those rules are just out the window, you know? And how, how can you explain a black hole [00:07:00] swallowing stars whole? And you know, that stars are just disappeared into nothingness.

[00:07:05] Katya Rucker: Stars and even light itself disappearing into the nothingness of a black hole has confounded the astrophysics community for decades. In 1975, Stephen Hawking introduced what he called the Information Paradox, or the idea that black holes destroy information permanently, which is a paradox because the laws of physics say that matter cannot simply disappear.

[00:07:30] And yet, we still have no idea what happens to anything that gets pulled into a black hole. There've been thousands of papers about how the paradox might be avoided or disproven, but to this day, no solution has been universally accepted by the scientific community. The edge of a black hole, which, remember, we can't see, we can only detect based on gravitational forces in the area, is called an event horizon. And in 2017, a major [00:08:00] breakthrough in our understanding of black holes occurred, thanks to an international collaboration known as the Event Horizon Telescope. 

[00:08:07] Tom Urbain: There was this very famous picture of a black hole taken by the Event Horizon Telescope. Um, there is actually a documentary on Netflix about it. It's very, very interesting for anyone who wants to understand how we've been able to take a picture of a black hole

[00:08:24] Katya Rucker: The documentary, which was released in 2020, is called Black Holes: The [00:08:30] Edge of All We Know, and as Tom said, it's available on Netflix. 

[00:08:34] Tom Urbain: And you can clearly see the shape of the black hole. So what you can see, basically, is just a very dark circle in the middle, which represents, you know, the, uh, the horizon of the black hole, and around, you can see like a swirling of light, uh, which is, uh, you know, where matter, uh, radiates, as it falls down into the black hole.

[00:08:57] Katya Rucker: This massive black hole is [00:09:00] in the Messier 87 galaxy, which is 55 million light years away, so it required extremely powerful telescopes for the observations to even be possible. The Event Horizon Telescope scientists cleverly simulated an earth-sized telescope by positioning eight ultra-powerful telescopes around the world from Hawaii to Mexico to Spain to the South Pole. And then, for 10 straight days, they had teams of scientists in each location focus these [00:09:30] telescopes on the place they had calculated the black hole to be.

[00:09:34] And then, it took two more years to aggregate all the data captured by each telescope before scientists were able to come up with the image Tom just described. Tom tells me about yet another groundbreaking event and the study of black holes that occurred a couple years before that iconic image was captured.

[00:09:53] Tom Urbain: Um, there also was another event like a few years ago where two black holes, [00:10:00] uh, had merged together. And, uh, when that happened, it creates a ripple through space and time that travels across the universe. And we have been able to detect that very, very, very small ripple, uh, in space time as it was reaching Earth, and that was recorded by an instrument called LIGO.

[00:10:25] Katya Rucker: The acronym LIGO stands for, get ready, Laser [00:10:30] Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory. And it's an instrument that detects gravitational waves from the universe. In 2015,, LIGO captured waves from the merger of two black holes, as Tom mentioned, which was an incredibly powerful event since each black hole was about 30 times the mass of our sun.

[00:10:52] But by the time these waves reached LIGO, the converted sound lasted only a 10th of a second, and it comes out like a little [00:11:00] tiny chirp. I'll play the clip of the sound here, courtesy of Caltech and MIT, the operators of LIGO. The first two sounds exactly match the frequencies of the gravitational waves, but they aren't easy for the human ear to pick up, so the second two sounds are played at higher frequencies. And it all happens so fast that both the original sound and the high-frequency sound will be played two more times each, so you can really hear the difference.

[00:11:30] [clip plays]

[00:11:39] As subtle as a drop of water from a leaky faucet, right? One big reason for that is that this black hole merger happened about 1.4 billion years ago. So by the time those waves reached Earth, they were like the tiniest ripples fanning out from the edge of a stone being dropped into the center of a [00:12:00] gigantic lake.

[00:12:02] The mysteries of black holes are what make them so fascinating, but the act of stargazing is all about finding and observing objects we can actually see, either with the naked eye or binoculars or a basic telescope. These could be stars, planets, constellations, or deep sky objects like nebulas or galaxies. I went and talked with Quinn Sykes, the observatory manager for Boston University's Astronomy department, about some of the most [00:12:30] interesting things a casual stargazer can observe in the night sky. 

[00:12:35] Quinn Sykes: The moon is probably the best thing to look at for an amateur astronomer, besides the planets, because stars are just pinpoints of light. You look at one star, there's a blue pinpoint of light. There's an orange pinpoint left. There's nothing much else to a single star, but a planet has angular size. Like, oh, you can zoom in and it gets bigger. Like, wow. And then you can see the surface of the planet, or the clouds, the color. You can see the moons of the [00:13:00] planets, like, man with Jupiter and Saturn, they keep finding new moons every day. They’re up to 70 plus on each of them I think. But we can see the four big Galilean moons with Jupiter and you can watch them move during the night. If you get out there for an hour, you can see that they're moving. You can see the distance change between Jupiter. You can watch them come out from behind Jupiter.

[00:13:19] Katya Rucker: Tom also loves to observe the planets. He tells me that he has shown Saturn to his friends through his telescope, and they're amazed they can actually get such a detailed [00:13:30] look at the ring around it. Jupiter is closer to Earth than Saturn, and it's relatively easy to spot, which makes it an ideal target for observing throughout the year. 

[00:13:41] Tom Urbain: Sometimes I will look at Jupiter for a straight 15 minutes. Uh, and just wondering what it's like to be there. You know, just wondering how things work over there, like, this massive ball of gas that I'm lucky to be able to see with my own eyes.

[00:13:56] You know, you see, you see images from, from [00:14:00] space probes, you see sketches from scientific artists. You hear, uh, you know, the number of moons that Jupiter has. You hear about how, uh, incredibly violent the storms of the red spot are on Jupiter. And so, you know, you see all the things on the internet and you read a lot of things, but there's nothing that beats being able to lay eyes literally [00:14:30] on Jupiter and being able to see it for yourself.

[00:14:33] Katya Rucker: Tom lives in a Bortle Class 4 area, and the Bortle scale measures the brightness of the night sky and the effect that light pollution has on what is visible to the naked eye. A Bortle Class 1 area is as remote as it gets, and a Class 9 area is a big inner city like downtown Manhattan. A Bortle Class 4 area is at the transition from rural to suburban, which is actually ideal for amateur [00:15:00] astronomers, because there aren't so many visible stars that they get in the way of some of the more obvious constellations and planets you can spot. You can find the Bortle class where you live at a website called lightpollutionmap.info.

[00:15:15] When I asked Quinn about how to spot a shooting star or a meteor shower, he tells me that I'd really need to get away from the city to a Bortle class 4 or 5 area. And he tells me that at the beginning of any stargazing session, our eyes need to go [00:15:30] through an adjustment called dark adaptation. 

[00:15:34] Quinn Sykes: Your eyes auto-calibrate, let's say. And so, when you're in a bright area, your pupils constrict, you're letting in less light. And if you go somewhere dark, your pupils will open up, but it takes your eyes a while to adapt to that. And after five or 10 minutes in the darkness, you will pick up, well you're picking up the same amount of light, but you will, you will recognize it a little easier, and you will see shapes and you will see more faint [00:16:00] objects after, you know, five to 10 minutes in the darkness.

[00:16:03] But if you know, if somebody uses a flash bulb, taking a picture, you're going to be blind for a few minutes. It takes, you know, you have to start the cycle over again, five or ten minutes. That’s why you see astronomers using red lights.

[00:16:15] Katya Rucker: Red light doesn't have the same impact on our dark adaptation as white or green light. And given that dark adaptation takes a minimum of five to 10 minutes, as Quinn said, it would be a real bummer to be in the middle of a stargazing session and say, catch a glimpse [00:16:30] of car headlights if you're near a road, and then need to sit there in the dark for another five to 10 minutes, waiting for your eyes to adapt again. Most stargazing apps are designed to be used without messing up your dark adaptation,but the light or phone screens can be a real impediment to stargazing if you aren't careful.

[00:16:48] I asked Tom what a typical stargazing session looks like for him. And he tells me that he really has to plan around the cloudy weather that is the norm in the UK. When he knows that he's in for a clear night, this is how it [00:17:00] usually goes. 

[00:17:01] Tom Urbain: I usually leave my telescope out in the backyard for like half an hour, just so that the, uh, the optical elements, uh, and you know, the different parts of the telescope get accustomed to the outside temperature.

[00:17:15] Um, that's, that's a good way to improve your viewing experience when everything's at the same temperature, uh, inside the telescope. Um, I usually spend about an hour to two hours, uh, outside, [00:17:30] having a look at all the things I want to look at that night. Um, sometimes I listen to podcasts at the same time I do it.

[00:17:38] Uh, but most of the time I, uh, I like to remain in silence. I find it very soothing to be outside and not hear a thing. Uh, and just being by myself, um, especially in today's world where everything is very noisy. My day job is in digital marketing, so all day every day I'm on a laptop working, you know. [00:18:00] Even after work, I'm, I'm checking things on my phone and, you know, marketing campaigns and stuff.

[00:18:05] So stargazing is a good way for me to cut myself off completely. It's like, uh, not, not having a spa day, but it's like, you know, two hours just for yourself.

[00:18:16] Katya Rucker: I actually thought the spa day was an excellent comparison to what it's like to spend time actively doing what we're passionate about.

[00:18:25] I'm always curious how engaging in a specific activity over and over [00:18:30] again teaches us broader lessons that impact other areas of our lives. Here's what Tom had to say when I asked him what lessons stargazing has taught him. 

[00:18:39] Tom Urbain: It taught me a lot of patience. I was not very patient as a younger man, but now, you know, 10 years down the line, I find myself being a lot more patient with, well, just about everything. You know, whether it's, uh, uh, life problems, or it's my daily work, or it’s, you know, uh, having two young [00:19:00] children running about in the house and making a mess and stuff like that, I've become a much more patient person since I've started doing stargazing.

[00:19:08] And it's all related to the hobby, really, because it does take time to get into it. It does take time to get good at it. Uh, it's a lot of trial and error. It's a lot of frustration that can arise from having problems with your telescope or not finding the target you want to see.

[00:19:26] Katya Rucker: Tom tells me that selecting a telescope was the [00:19:30] most overwhelming learning curve for him, since there are different types of telescopes and then different models within each type. This means different eyepieces, different focusers, different aperture sizes, different optical systems within the telescope tubes.

[00:19:44] Talk about choice paralysis. If you want to skip all that research, Tom tells me, go with a Dobsonian telescope, since they are designed especially for amateur astronomers. 

[00:19:55] Tom Urbain: It's not a lot of maintenance. It's not a lot of set up. It’s a [00:20:00] lot less complicated than some of the telescopes out there. Um, so yeah, if you, if you are interested in trying stargazing, I would recommend to look into some Dobsonian telescopes, and they are fairly inexpensive as well.

[00:20:12] Katya Rucker: When it comes to telescopes, prices can range from hundreds to thousands of dollars. So fairly inexpensive would still fall in the $250 to $500 price range. But to Tom's point, you can get a lot of power and ease of maintenance out of a Dobsonian [00:20:30] telescope in that range. And just to note that Dobsonian isn't a specific brand. It's a design that was created by an amateur astronomer named John Dobson in 1965. And John Dobson was a huge proponent of sidewalk astronomy, or setting up a telescope in a public place so anyone who's curious can look through it. Either way, investing in a telescope is a big jump for anyone who just wants to try stargazing.

[00:20:56] There are publicly accessible telescope viewing opportunities [00:21:00] in nearly every state in the US, offered by universities, museums, and astronomy organizations. I put a link to the website with these opportunities listed by state in the show notes for this episode. Stargazing with the naked eye can still be a fun experience, but the benefit of using a telescope is being able to see deep sky objects. 

[00:21:22] Tom Urbain: Deep sky means any target that's outside the solar system, so you’ve got your nebulas and your galaxies. Um, a good [00:21:30] one in the Northern Hemisphere is the Orion Nebula, a very popular target. Uh, even with binoculars, you can see, you can see it. Uh, the Andromeda galaxy is a good one as well. Uh, it looks like a very faint smudge, uh, inside the field of view, but you know, it's still, it's still mind-blowing every time I look at it with my binoculars, I'm still, I'm still amazed, you know, even, you know, nine years of doing astronomy, uh, it's still amazing that I can [00:22:00] see a galaxy that's so far away.

[00:22:01] Katya Rucker: The Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years away, which means that the light that is reaching us from this galaxy today left the galaxy 2.5 million years ago when early humans were entering the Stone Age. The Andromeda galaxy is actually big and bright enough to be seen with the naked eye on a moonless night in an area without too much light pollution. It's the most distant object that is visible with the naked eye [00:22:30] and it's moving toward our galaxy, the Milky Way, at a speed of 110 kilometers per second. So it's going to collide with the Milky way in about 4 billion years. 

To Tom, all the early challenges associated with becoming a better stargazer are absolutely worth the patience and perseverance that the hobby requires upfront, because you learn these fascinating things about objects in the universe, and then you get to actually see them with your own eyes.

[00:22:58] Tom Urbain: It's like an old car with a diesel [00:23:00] engine, you know, it takes time to warm up, but once you've warmed up, you know, you’re out there and the payoff is amazing because then you've got access to the whole night sky and you'll be able to, with time, to locate objects, without even looking at your, star map on your phone. You'll be able to set up your telescope, you know, in five minutes instead of half an hour.

[00:23:21] Uh it's just, yeah, it's just -- do not give up. As long as you don't give up, and you keep at it, you'll be able to enjoy stargazing for the rest [00:23:30] of your life. 

[00:23:30] Katya Rucker: Sometimes our passions are just for us. They're a refuge where we can be completely present with ourselves and that thing we love to do, but it can also be really special to share them with the people we love most. These were Tom's final words as we wrapped up our conversation. 

[00:23:48] Tom Urbain: Yeah, I will just say, you know, I think this, uh, this hobby will follow me for life. I'm hooked, and I look forward to teaching those things to my two daughters. Uh, they [00:24:00] do, they do start to show interest in space, and asking me which planet is what, and, and are there people living on Jupiter and stuff like that.

[00:24:08] Or every time we go out and it's nighttime, you know, they’ll be seeing the moon and get all excited and say, “Daddy, Daddy, there's the moon, there's the moon.” And that warms my heart, you have no idea. And I do look forward to a time where they can stay up a little bit later at night and we can enjoy those stargazing sessions together. [00:24:30] 

[00:24:33] Katya Rucker: I want to give a huge thanks to Tom Urbain for bringing his stargazing passion to the I'd Rather Be podcast, and for channeling his passion into the creation of a stargazer’s dream website that has everything from telescope tutorials to the internet’s funniest space memes. It's starlust.org, and I highly recommend you check it out.

And thank you to Quinn Sykes from Boston University [00:25:00] for the tips about dark adaptation for our eyes and for sharing some of the things a novice astronomer might want to look for their first time out.

[00:25:08] Quinn hosts a weekly public open night at the BU observatory, which is completely free to the public, though the event has become so popular that tickets are required, and they're usually gone within five minutes of becoming available every Thursday morning at 11:00 AM. 

If you're enjoying I'd Rather Be, the best way you can help the show grow is [00:25:30] by sharing it with friends or colleagues who also listened to podcasts. And, you can stay up to date by following I'd Rather Be podcast on Instagram. This episode was hosted, produced and edited by me, Katya Rucker. Show notes, and the full transcript for this episode can be found at idratherbepodcast.com. Have a great week, and thanks for listening. [00:26:00]