MANILA, Philippines—A blanket of clouds cast a pall over eastern Metro Manila on the cool summer evening of April 3, and a chill in the air foreboded rain. Somewhere over the horizon, the moon and the stars were obscured by a dark gray haze.
Quite an inauspicious start for a night of stargazing.
“Clouds are the astronomer’s worst enemy,” Milo Dacanay, chair of the Philippine Astronomical Society (Philastrosoc), said with a chuckle. “We wait,” he told the others.
The practice of astronomy requires patience—a lot of it, Dacanay said.
Last Friday was one of Philastrosoc’s free public viewing events in front of the Semicon Building on Marcos Highway in Pasig City. With the group were a handful of high school and college students it invited to the gathering.
“These activities are meant to trigger a spark of interest among our youth,” Dacanay said. “There could be a Newton among us, or a Galileo. All it takes is a trigger.”
But that night, the skies, the moon and the stars were not cooperating, hiding behind their cloudy veil.
A group of little neighborhood kids, from 5 to 10 years old, milled around, fascinated by the telescopes, and the promise of looking at something different, something new.
But like all children, they soon got bored and moved on. “We’ll come back,” a little boy said.
“Patience,” repeated Dacanay.
Then, in an instant, the clouds cleared. The moon announced itself. Saturn made its own grand entrance much farther up, and Sirius appeared, too, along with many other heavenly bodies.
Like magic
To the students looking into a telescope for the first time, it was like magic.
“It’s amazing!” exclaimed Angeli Lisondra, 19, a nursing student from Trinity College. “Saturn looks like a toy. It’s so beautiful,” she said. “The moon is so close, and you could really see the craters and the shadows.”
She said she loved looking at the stars with her bare eyes. But looking at them through a telescope was an entirely different experience. “They are so fascinating and so mysterious,” Lisondra said.
Her reaction did not surprise Dacanay who has seen so many other students that way. “It never fails, especially with Saturn. The students always go ‘Cool!’ or ‘Wow!’ or ‘Oh my God,’ or ’I can’t believe it!’” he said.
“Looking at Saturn on a photo is different from looking at it through a telescope. When the students actually see the rings, they are so amazed. Some even joke, ‘Hey, you just put a picture there, didn’t you?’” he said.
So romantic
The moon elicits a similar reaction. “The moon is already so romantic, looking at it with our naked eyes. But with a high-powered lens, you could see even the shadows of the crater. Many people get goose bumps just looking at it,” he said.
“It’s thrilling because you’re seeing the moon so close,” Dacanay said.
Edmund Rosales, a former president of Philastrosoc and University of the Philippines faculty member, said the best time to look at the moon was when it was in the first or last quarter, not a full moon.
“When it’s a full moon, it’s too bright and it hurts the eyes. That’s why I always tell the students, look at the moon a few days before the full moon, so they can really see the craters and the shadows,” said Rosales, now the resident scientist of Channel 4.
Rosales said looking at a full moon was only for the romantics. “If you want the full experience, look at the moon when it’s a crescent,” he said. “It will change your mind.”
Most popular
Dacanay said the most popular celestial bodies were Saturn, the moon and Jupiter, whose moons are in various formations at different times of the evening. Meteor showers and comets are also common favorites of the students, he said.
Oddly enough, Venus is not so popular, he said. “It’s because there are always clouds. It’s better to see Venus with your naked eye,” he added.
Dacanay said his personal favorite was the globular cluster, which he described as the place where “the oldest stars can be found.”
“The globular cluster contains hundreds of thousands of stars and failed galaxies,” he said. “They are fascinating because they have been there since the beginning of time.”
For Diana Tabar, a 20-year-old environmental science student from Ateneo de Manila University, looking into a telescope for the first time has rekindled her interest in astronomy.
“When I was a child I wanted to be an astronomer,” she said.
Many mysteries
Looking at the heavenly bodies is a bit disquieting, she said.
“It makes you realize that there are so many things that you do not know. We’re so immersed in the present that we fail to see the bigger picture. There are so many mysteries in the universe that we do not know yet,” Tabar said.
Which is exactly the kind of reaction that Dacanay hopes for.
“Our education at present is focused on the present, like politics and economics. They are so recent. With astronomy, its impact may not be felt immediately, but they are important nonetheless,” he said.
Move some place else
Dacanay noted that in two billion years, “the sun will bloat itself up and eat into the orbit of the Earth and burn everything in its path.”
Earthlings will have to find a way to change the planet’s orbit or move some place else that can support human life, that is, “if we are still around in two billion years.”
But he said it was a given that “we will have to leave the solar system at some point.”
Free public viewing
Dacanay, an engineer by profession but whose passion is astronomy, said Philastrosoc would continue free public viewing activities in the hope of discovering a modern-day Galileo somewhere in the archipelago.
He encouraged students and other young Filipinos to be amateur astronomers in their own right. Many contributions in the field of astronomy have come from amateurs, he said.
Dacanay said he could no longer recall the first time he looked into a telescope. But the first time he looked into one that he himself made is forever etched in his memory.
He said he made it using only “a PVC pipe, plywood, some materials I bought from the hardware store, and a mirror which I had to buy abroad.”
Dacanay said: “When I looked into my improvised telescope and saw Saturn with my own eyes, the feeling was indescribable. All of a sudden, here you are, looking at Saturn with your own telescope. It was almost unbearable.”
