Christopher Klinge
Kendall Hall focuses a telescope on the roof of the Parthenon so people can get a closer view of the cosmos.
If you skipped the gyro line on a recent Friday night and headed straight to the rooftop of Parthenon — the popular late-night Greek restaurant on State Street where the ouzo, an anise-flavored Greek liquor, flows like water — you would have found a different scene entirely. Queued up below the unilluminated string lights, people waited to look through one of two large telescopes while Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” played in the background. This evening’s “Sip and Stargaze” event (there is ouzo available on the rooftop, too) is part of the Wisconsin Science Fest.
Andrew Nine and Kendall Hall, graduate students in UW-Madison’s Astronomy Department, are among five volunteers stationed at the telescopes to direct and explain to people what they’re gazing at. Hall studies hydrogen and “what eventually forms stars.” As she explains, “It’s hard to see the most abundant molecule in the universe so I try to figure out how.”
Working in tandem, Nine and Hall adjust the telescope, focusing on various celestial bodies, and talk with the people taking turns looking through the telescope. “We’re going to look at Saturn here in a minute,” Nine says. “It’s available now.”
In its ninth year, the Wisconsin Science Fest is a four-day festival that takes place every October. “It’s a collection of grassroots science events that happen all over the state,” says Wesley Marner, deputy director of the festival.
Sip and Stargaze is part of Science on the Square, “one of our marquee events,” says Marner. “This year it has grown to 31 different stops in the vicinity of Capitol Square where people can literally wander into a venue and check out anything from geology to winemaking to astronomy to plants.”
Marner says one of the missions of Wisconsin Science Fest, founded by Laura Heisler, director of the festival, and George Tzougros, executive director of the Wisconsin Arts Board, is to “humanize science.”
Mingling among the stargazers this evening is Eric Wilcots, a professor of astronomy at UW-Madison and the interim dean of the College of Letters and Science. Wilcots also serves as co-chair of the Science Fest steering committee and loves that people might stumble upon these events without knowing it. “People are just out on a Friday night and they randomly encounter science,” Wilcots says. “And that’s awesome.”
One person who wandered up to the rooftop is Jacob Turner, a UW alum who studied under artist and author Lynda Barry. An artist, Turner says he’s never stargazed before “but thinks about it in theory.”
“I’ve seen the episode of The Simpsons where Bart discovers a comet,” he says. “That is the only exposure I have to space science.”
Earlier in the day Turner attended an event about scientists engaging the public through the arts. Having just seen Saturn through one of the telescopes on Parthenon’s roof, Turner says he appreciates the opportunity to chat with the scientists here.
“As a creative person I feel like science can unlock a world of beauty but there are barriers,” Turner says. “So it helps having people who can explain it.”
336: Events at the 2019 Wisconsin Science Fest.
90: Cities and towns across Wisconsin where events have occurred.
“I just want to handle some meteorites!”: Richard Costello, a Parthenon employee who ran up to the roof top during one of his breaks. (But the promised meteorites from NASA never made it to the event.)
Meade LX: The telescopes used during the Sip and Stargaze event
$2,000-$3,000: Cost of one of these telescopes
Albireo: A double star — two stars located so close together they appear as one star from Earth — in the constellation of Cygnus, which Hall located through her telescope. “It’s very hard to see the color of the stars with your own eyes,” Hall says. “But one is gold and one is blue.”
