Look up! The Dark Sky Festival Illuminates the Cosmos

20 September 2024 – CAPE COD, MA – Cape Cod's beauty is all around -- but look up or you could miss some of it! The Cape Cod Astronomical Society and the Cape Cod National Seashore co-hosted the third annual Dark Sky Festival at Marconi Beach to help the public look up to our cosmic neighbors and their importance in the night sky.

What is Dark Sky Festival?

20 September 2024 – CAPE COD, MA - Just like the sand on Cape Cod shore,  the night sky above  is also ever changing. It opens a window through a time machine going back some 20 million years. The outer side of the Cape offers up an extra special layer of darkness for peering into the cosmos wonders above.

The Lower and Outer Cape region lies miles from shopping malls and big cities. Even the state highway, Route 6, that runs through the lower “arm” lacks street lights, adding to those layers of darkness at night. Through the darkness of the night sky in Eastham, Wellfleet, and Truro, the Milky Way and other galaxies, stars, planets and constellations shine extra brightly without interference from terrestrial light pollution.

Into this delightfully dark environment, the Cape Cod Astronomical Society and the Cape Cod National Seashore launched the Dark Sky Festival three year ago. The Society says even if you don’t have a telescope, you can still see details in the dark sky with basic binoculars or even with just your own eyes .

Joseph Norvilas, Park Ranger, led this year's Star Party, guiding some 400 visitors from Marconi Beach’s dark parking lot to the beach, attaching red cellophane to people’s flashlights to protect their night vision. The astronomers waited at the beach with telescopes to help people locate different celestial bodies. 

Why is the night sky important to Cape Cod?

“The night sky is a very important resource out here on Cape Cod,” said Norvilas. “Things such as birds require the night sky to navigate. Horseshoe crabs use the moon to know when to lay their eggs. Even insects use the night sky.”

Norvilas pointed out how the night sky has been a source of inspiration for poets and artists for many generations, and has helped birth many valuable pieces of art. “It's pretty spectacular to be able to be out here at night on a calm night and listening to the waves crashing on the beaches, and hearing the birds and the wind, while also looking up at the Milky Way," he said.

What can you do at the Cape Cod Astronomical Society?

On Cape Cod there is an abundance of a la carte food menus offering visitors their hearts’ desires -- but at the Cape Cod Astronomical Society’s Werner Schmidt Observatory in Yarmouth, you can have stars on demand instead. The on-site PlaneWave telescope offers a selection of stars, planets and galaxies.

“If someone wants to look at a planet, particular star, a galaxy, a nebula, whatever might be up there, the telescope can actually find it very quickly. You have a database you simply type in or go to the item you want to see,” says Charles Burke, Observatory Director.

What can we see in the cosmos above Cape Cod?

At monthly "star parties" the society's members invite the public to borrow or bring their own telescopes to the observatory. They also offer lectures with guest speakers to further interest and education in our dark skies.

Telescope engineer Gary Walker is fascinated both by the telescopes’ technique and the infinite universe. “It shows a sense of how vast the universe is and how inconsequential we are here on Earth by comparison. Some of these objects are a couple of million light years away,” said Walker. “In a telescope like this one, you can actually see objects that are 8 billion light years away. So that's almost, uh, three quarters of the way to the end of the universe. And then the camera, of course, enables us to photograph things that we can't see even in the telescope. I guess most people sort of wonder, you know, what is out there.”

When is the super blue moon on Cape Cod?

Such distances and numbers are nearly impossible to grasp for most people and maybe that is why our closest neighbor - the moon- never ceases to fascinate us. Right now our very own moon, 240,000 miles away, is putting on quite a show. The second full moon of the month occured on September 17; this  also happened when the moon is at its closest point to earth, making it a "super blue moon."  As if that wasn’t enough, there is also a partial lunar eclipse visible from Cape Cod.

“I’ve been looking at the moon for 50 years and never gets old,” says society member Charles Burke. “And we can take great pictures of it, but I think the moon's more exciting to look at live.” Burke says even though we see the moon every night, looking at it through a telescope is particularly exciting. “It looks like you’re right there. So it’s always a favorite.”

So grab a pair of binoculars, find a dark place (which Cape Cod has a-plenty!), look up and let the words telescope engineer Walker linger as you do: “Now they think that there may be a planet around half of the stars that we see. And the implication there is if there are that many planets, then there must be life somewhere else, which is the fundamental question of are we the only ones here? Are we the only life?”

Walker says neither he nor most astronomers believe we are alone in the universe. “ I believe in statistics,” Walker said. “And there are literally millions and billions of planets so there must be life on some other planet, many other planets. But whether we'll ever be able to see that, it will depend on the technology going forward."