Astronomy

STAR SANCTUARIES
Protecting
America’s
LAST DARK SKIES
Few stargazing sites deliver like America’s national parks.
But even these places are under threat. by Eric Betz
A smattering of crisp white clouds lingers
west of Grand Canyon National Park.
And as the desert Sun sets, smoke from a far-off fire turns the sky as
red as the surrounding Supai sandstone. Venus slowly emerges from
behind the clouds like a beacon of the night. Jupiter and the evening
star push toward the horizon, racing the crescent Moon in a perfect
isosceles triangle. Their setting leaves an inky black sky bustling with
activity. Faint stray meteors streak at zenith, and satellites crawl across
the sky like ants on their ardent paths.
If you sat here on a moonless night like
this and counted through until dawn, you
could tally thousands of stars.
“The place you are in is special — keep
that in your mind — in contrast to the places
that most of us live,” says International Dark-
Sky Association (IDA) astronomer John
Barentine, who manages the Dark-Sky Places
Program. “Every human being once shared
this experience of looking up into the night
sky and seeing it filled with stars.”
Before the spread of electricity, humans
across the planet knew the stories written
54 ASTRONOMY • JUNE 2016
in the skies. Sitting around smoldering
campfires, people looked to the stars and
relived the tales of their heroes. Now these
experiences are confined to star sanctuaries
like Grand Canyon National Park.
With the nation celebrating a century
since the inception of the National Park
Service, the agency has recommitted itself
to protecting a resource overlooked by
many in America — the night sky.
Forgotten heroes
And, as a crowd builds in a darkened
parking lot near Grand Canyon’s Mather
Point, the talk here turns to the greatest
of those ancient heroes — Hercules.
Barentine is guiding a group of parkgoers
on a tour of the night sky. “Imagine with
me that there is the body of a man who’s
kneeling,” Barentine says as he sketches the
figure on the sky in green laser. “His body
is this set of four stars here that’s sometimes
called The Keystone.”
As part of his 12 labors of penance,
Barentine explains, Hercules was forced to
steal the golden apples of the Hesperides.
To get them, our Greek hero — the illegitimate
son of Zeus — adventured in search
of Hera’s secret garden and killed the
dragon that guarded them. That serpent is
now commemorated in the constellation
Draco the Dragon, placed next to Hercules
in the night sky.
“The human brain saw patterns in
those stars. And we translated all of our
human hopes and our fears and our dreams
and our worries onto those stars,” says
Barentine. “The natural night sky inspires.
TYLER NORDGREN