Who are we?
Hi! I’m Bill Green. In 2017, I brought my telescope out to one of Philadelphia’s most crowded and light polluted street corners. What happened next changed my life forever. Someone asked to look at the moon and said “WOW! I’ve never seen that before!!!” Then another person wanted to see, then another, and it’s been that way ever since.
The Street Astronomers bring their telescopes to public places and offer people to look through them, always for free. We’ve started groups in Copenhagen, Berlin, Brussels and Philadelphia. It’s an informal club made of friends and neighbors. We work together to give more people the chance to see the beauty of the cosmos. You can join us too! We will help you find equipment and teach you how to use a telescope, so that you can show people moon craters, Saturn’s rings, and the rest of the Universe.
So why do we think that’s important?
Street Astronomy is for everyone.
9 out of 10 people have never used a telescope before in their life. In a world surrounded by city lights, we’ve lost touch with the night sky. We want to give everyone a chance to look through a telescope. One by one, about 100.000 people have looked through our telescopes.
Street Astronomy fights Light Pollution
Light pollution harms more than just our view of the night sky. We don’t have to accept its harm to our health, sleep and wildlife as inevitable. If we want to see the Milky Way again from the city center, we must first remind people that the night sky still exists.
Street Astronomy builds communities
Strangers and neighbors around telescopes to look at the night sky together. Saturn’s rings remind us that we are small, but also connected to a big mysterious universe.
Street Astronomy is not your typical astro-club
Many astronomy clubs are focused on gear and photography. They meet far away from the lights, far away from cities, and enjoy unbelievable views of distant galaxies. The street astronomers stay in cities and focus on science outreach. We prefer eyepieces over photography, so that people have a chance to see things for themselves.
Where did street astronomy come from?
We didn’t invent street astronomy – it’s part of a much longer tradition. Street Astronomy, or Sidewalk Astronomy, was first popularized in California, by a monk and scientist named John Dobson. In the 1940s, after working as a chemist on the Manhattan project, Dobson joined a Vedantu monastery. He was given the task of combining the Vedas, their sacred text, with the discoveries of modern astronomy: the ideas that there were billions of galaxies and that the Universe is expanding. No easy task! Dobson decided that first he should build a telescope and have a look for himself at what was going on out there.
When he succeeded in building a new kind of telescope out of garden equipment, he took one look at the moon’s craters and thought “Holy Cow, everyone needs to see this.”
Yes – this is the same guy that invented the Dobsonian telescope. But he didn’t call it that. He called it the “Sidewalk Telescope”, because amateur astronomers are meant to deploy them in service of the general public.
He started sneaking out of the monastery to bring his telescope to a streetcorner in Sacramento. Unfortunately, the other monks didn’t believe that was what he was doing at night, so they kicked him out of the monastery, and he founded the Sidewalk Astronomers. By the 1970s, the movement had grown worldwide.
