Visiting Griffith Observatory on a Sunday is a trip. (And by that I mean to use "trip" with the slang definition.) It's like Disneyland, only with less places to blow money and more learning going on. It was very busy and crowded, and, like Disneyland, a cacophony of languages and accents were eavesdropped upon. Parking was a bear, and we got there less than an hour after they opened. It was plenty worse when we left.
On my quick trip on that Wednesday in September, I skipped the planetarium show, wanting to experience it with Corrie when we could be together.
I like planetarium shows. I have a historical fondness for science things. I was the first student at my elementary school to go to Space Camp, and even before that I attended a summer science class program. The memories are hazy, but I do remember their experiments with the flora local to the Van Buren Ave/Auburn Blvd area in Citrus Heights, and, not coincidentally, the planetarium show. (Another memory was of the the ninety-one second knockout Mike Tyson laid on Michael Spinks.) Leaning back in the chair in the dark and watching the pointer pick out the constellations and planets always got me excited to be able to show off that knowledge. Too bad that the night sky in Sacramento in 1988 was already too polluted with light.
It was with that history that when they aired the episode of South Park with the planetarium guy who's speech impediment causes him to pronounce the word as "plan-e-'arium" (he can't pronounce the 'T' in that word only), I totally got a kick out of him trying to hypnotize the kids during the show. Very soon after that episode came on, I caught a scene in a exploitation film from the 70s with a pimp hypnotizing his ladies during a planetarium show. That made the bizarre idea that Trey and Matt came up with more understandable.
In any case, this past Sunday we got our tickets and when the time came, got our seats, and got ready to lounge and learn, or be reminded anyway. The show is led by a knowledgeable person, and ours was an older lady who sounded like Eartha Kitt. It was strange at first, but oddly soothing as she went on.
At one point during the talk, as we relaxed in the dark, the dome's black surface looked mottled with dancing blurs. Strange, I remember thinking, things weren't this blurry earlier. The blotches of blur would fade off the side. For a few minutes about the unfathomable immensity of the universe our Eartha Kitt spoke, and we watched the dancing blurs. She was speaking about galaxy clusters and remote-ness, and eventually the last of the dancing blurs went away, as a patch of whiteness began to take form in the center of the dome. In it, slowly growing, were a few nice, regular looking galaxies. This was our remote galactic neighborhood. We soon watched those few galaxies fly by, and a smaller, single spiral galaxy slowly came into focus. We're even isolated in our own neighborhood. It was then that we all realized something startling:
That 'Dance of the Blurs' was really our journey through a section of the universe. All those blurry objects passing by or moving about, those were distant galactic 'hoods, and judging by how long it took the traveling view (that would have been many, many magnitudes more than the speed of light, the ultimate (for now) speed limit)) we're really quite out there.
Our galaxy came into view, and we eventually saw ourselves out in the boondocks in an empty space between two arms. The view/journey came all the way to Earth, then Southern California, and stopped right out front of the Observatory.
We stepped out of the show to the same spot.
Post Script: Our galactic neighborhood is far from many things, and the Milky Way spiral galaxy is oddly isolated even from it. In our general area, you could say, there are three galaxies: one regular (the Milky Way spiral) and two irregulars. They're classified as irregular dwarf galaxies, which has a specific definition. Wouldn't it be cool if you could see them? It makes sense that we should be able to see them, right, if they're in our galactic 'hood and all.
Turns out they're absolutely visible, only in the southern hemisphere, though. Known as the Magellanic Clouds (the Large and the Small), they've been known to southern star-gazers for as long as those people gazed.
do you remember going to there with cousin Michael and they wouldn't let him in to the show because the shape of the dome carried sound so well they didn't allow children under a certain age in. We were not able to see the show that day we did see every thing else and you thought it was the best day of your young site seeing life. This was before space camp even.
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