Looking Up - Accessing the Night Sky with Kevin Schindler
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Dave: Hey, this is Dave. Elle: And this is Elle. Dave: We sat down with Kevin Schindler, the Public Information Officer and historian at Lowell Observatory, to chat about his time as an astronomer residence and to learn more about the night sky. Elle: While Dave had the chance to sit down with him in person. I phoned in from the North Rim. Please forgive our audio quality. We tried. Dave: In this episode, we'll be taking Kevin’s advice and looking up at the night sky. To learn more about it. Kevin: My name is Kevin Schindler, and I'm the historian and Public Information Officer at Lowell Observatory, and I've been at Lowell for 28 years. Early on in my career, I was in the public program at Lowell, so I started as a tour guide, then ended up managing the program for a dozen years or something like that. And now I I'm the historian, and so I try to document the history, which is not just back then, but now, it's kind of for me it's not history and current, it's the heritage that we've been doing for a long time. So, the heritage of research. So, I do with that I write articles and some books, and give talks, and kind of help with planning exhibits and that sort of thing. And then for the Public Information Officer, PIO, that's the other half of what I do and that's promoting the observatory. So that's largely the media relations, and so if we have a science story or we're doing something special for our public program, or there's an unusual or interesting astronomical event, like we have eclipses coming up so and so I'll do press releases and media alerts, set up interviews with our staff, host tours with media personnel so that people from around the world coming like to check out Northern Arizona, they'll go to the Grand Canyon, to here in Flagstaff, and so we'll facilitate tours up here at the observatory promoting everything so they'll write about it and let people know. We were talking earlier and mentioned crisis management. We don't have that much here. We do have some things you would call, I don't know, emergencies in a different way or things that you know when we closed for COVID for instance we had to gather and get some information together quickly. I mean there's certainly some of that. My title is Public Information Officer, but it really focuses on the media relations and everyday activities going on that are interesting and people want to know about. Dave: For most of our visitors that come to Grand Canyon when we're giving night sky programs, I find that most people have never looked at, looked up. What's your approach for starting to teach people just the beginning steps about the night sky? Kevin: I think the first thing is just to go outside and look up. It’s as simple as that it. You know, it's so cool to look through telescopes, and you know it's a whole universe revealed when you do that, but most of us don't have access to telescopes. Or maybe you can go and visit an observatory or an astronomy club, but just looking up to me is stunning because there's so much you can see with the unaided eye or with a pair of binoculars you can see more, but there's so much you can see if you just look. I'm reminded of a Yogi Berra. “You can observe a lot by just looking,” and it's really true. And I think part of that is, that you can really notice a lot of things like the moon rising and look at that really bright dot. Go back in a couple of nights to see where it is, how it's changed position. But I think another thing for me that I'd like to tell people just starting to stargaze is, you know, go out and look up, but also, you know, think a little bit about the sky and how important it has been to human culture. Because it's so ingrained with our everyday life. And we think about time, like AM and PM are based on astronomy. The length of the day, the length of the month, the length of the year, that's based on astronomy. Finding your cardinal direction if you're lost, use astronomy, you know whether it's the sun during the day or the North Star or other stars. It is so inspiring to look up and to see a shooting star, or to see a meteor shower, or an eclipse, but also just in our everyday life. How you know from the beginning, people looked up and its astronomy, they called the oldest science, originally called astrology, before it was really a science. Just looking up at the sky and it how much it impacts our everyday life. So just going out and looking up to me is the big first step. Dave: You talked about your background earlier, so I know you studied paleontology and history. How did you get started in astronomy? That's kind of a different career move. Kevin: Yeah. So, I grew up in Ohio and I'm not sure if we ever have clear skies there. It's always cloudy, it seemed like, but I was always interested in fossils. So, I looked down. I was always looking down during the daytime. I never did anything with astronomy. I went to college for geology and paleontology, and then I when I started working at Lowell Observatory in 1995, I applied here and when I was applying, you know the guy interviewing me, who's a friend of mine, now we've known each other for years, he said, “What do you know about the night sky and how many constellations can you identify?” I said “none, but I I'll sure be glad to learn.” And so, I think that's something that I found is sort of beneficial for me at least, when I'm talking to people about the night sky is that it hasn't been a passion all my life. I found it later on, and I really love it. I haven't studied all my life and used all the lingo. I kind of talk about astronomy in the same language that everyday people do. And so, I never have to worry much about talking as it were, over somebody's head, or using lingo that doesn't make sense because I'm conscious of that. And so, I try to explain it. I just started kind of by accident. You know, there's an opening at this place called Lowell Observatory, they do science, they have history, they do outreach. I love all that. So, I mean, it could have been an arboretum, or it could have been a number of things, but it was an observatory. And I've, you know, been doing it for a while now. And so, like now I just you know, I just love it. It's funny if you, if you, I always think of it, life is kind of like one of those mazes you do. You know, you start out, you know you're trying to go from one point to the end, and you go have all these different possible ways of going. And if you start at the start, you might have a couple you're not quite sure where the path is taking you, but if you start at the end and go backwards, it's pretty obvious how to do it, and I think that's probably all of us to some degree. I mean, some people certainly have their life planned out, but so many of us, one turn takes you in a different direction and for me looking back, I can see how I got here, but I sure as heck would never have been able to predict that when I was young. Elle: Can you tell us about the first time that you ever got to view like a deep sky object or a planet or something like that? Kevin: When I started here at Lowell Observatory in 1995, and I actually don't remember the first thing I looked at because we had a couple of things that, it was either Jupiter or Saturn, I think it was both. They were both up in the sky. But it was it was neat because we when I started here, we didn't have all these smaller portable telescopes. We had a big 24-inch diameter, 32-foot-long telescopes, the historic one that still people can look at today, and so just being inside of that room with the red glow of lights, looking through this 32-foot-long behemoth and looking at Jupiter and Saturn, I think it was both. But anyways, it was it was just, just stunning and you know, what stood out to me was again that I was I able to look and see these things up close but it was also almost as stunning that they were so small. Because I didn't have the background in astronomy, most of my connection with astronomy was seeing the cover of National Geographic or things like that that had these spectacular images that were taken by spacecraft that have flown out there. And so that's what I expected to see. And so when I looked through telescopes like, that's really cool, but it sure is small. But again, that's something that has stuck with me to explain to visitors, you know it's not going to be like the cover of a magazine with a processed image that's been blown up and from a spacecraft out there. But imagine what you're doing is you're looking at lights that, you know, if it's the moon, it's light, that start traveling to us half a second ago, and look at the details you can see. And again, I think because of my different background has served me well because I wasn't a hardcore astronomy nerd in the beginning. And so, I just feel like somebody that picked it up as a hobby, except I get paid for it, which is really nice. Elle: What do you think would be the biggest hurdle to accessing the night sky as a layperson, or as somebody who doesn't have a telescope and things like that? And how would you suggest overcoming that hurdle? Kevin: I think the biggest hurdle is finding clear sky or dark sky. 80% of the world can't see the Milky Way Galaxy. They live in a place where you can't see the Milky Way. 80%. So. I mean, that means, you know, 80% of the world lives in populated areas where there's artificial light pollution. I think that's probably the biggest hurdle. I mean, again, it's, it's great to look through
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