Looking Up - Accessing the Night Sky with Kevin Schindler

Kevin Schindler has a career in astronomy spanning nearly thirty years in the Northern Arizona area. Listen in on this episode of Behind the Scenery, where Kevin divulges his atypical career journey, some of his favorite moments and biggest inspirations, debunks misconceptions about accessing the night sky, and offers advice for success in night sky viewing. Just look up! Learn more about Kevin's work at lowell.edu.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Dave: Hey, this is Dave. Elle: And this is Elle. Dave: We sat down with Kevin Schindler, the Public Information Officer and historian at Lowell Observatory, to chat about his time as an astronomer residence and to learn more about the night sky. Elle: While Dave had the chance to sit down with him in person. I phoned in from the North Rim. Please forgive our audio quality. We tried. Dave: In this episode, we'll be taking Kevin’s advice and looking up at the night sky. To learn more about it. Kevin: My name is Kevin Schindler, and I'm the historian and Public Information Officer at Lowell Observatory, and I've been at Lowell for 28 years. Early on in my career, I was in the public program at Lowell, so I started as a tour guide, then ended up managing the program for a dozen years or something like that. And now I I'm the historian, and so I try to document the history, which is not just back then, but now, it's kind of for me it's not history and current, it's the heritage that we've been doing for a long time. So, the heritage of research. So, I do with that I write articles and some books, and give talks, and kind of help with planning exhibits and that sort of thing. And then for the Public Information Officer, PIO, that's the other half of what I do and that's promoting the observatory. So that's largely the media relations, and so if we have a science story or we're doing something special for our public program, or there's an unusual or interesting astronomical event, like we have eclipses coming up so and so I'll do press releases and media alerts, set up interviews with our staff, host tours with media personnel so that people from around the world coming like to check out Northern Arizona, they'll go to the Grand Canyon, to here in Flagstaff, and so we'll facilitate tours up here at the observatory promoting everything so they'll write about it and let people know. We were talking earlier and mentioned crisis management. We don't have that much here. We do have some things you would call, I don't know, emergencies in a different way or things that you know when we closed for COVID for instance we had to gather and get some information together quickly. I mean there's certainly some of that. My title is Public Information Officer, but it really focuses on the media relations and everyday activities going on that are interesting and people want to know about. Dave: For most of our visitors that come to Grand Canyon when we're giving night sky programs, I find that most people have never looked at, looked up. What's your approach for starting to teach people just the beginning steps about the night sky? Kevin: I think the first thing is just to go outside and look up. It’s as simple as that it. You know, it's so cool to look through telescopes, and you know it's a whole universe revealed when you do that, but most of us don't have access to telescopes. Or maybe you can go and visit an observatory or an astronomy club, but just looking up to me is stunning because there's so much you can see with the unaided eye or with a pair of binoculars you can see more, but there's so much you can see if you just look. I'm reminded of a Yogi Berra. “You can observe a lot by just looking,” and it's really true. And I think part of that is, that you can really notice a lot of things like the moon rising and look at that really bright dot. Go back in a couple of nights to see where it is, how it's changed position. But I think another thing for me that I'd like to tell people just starting to stargaze is, you know, go out and look up, but also, you know, think a little bit about the sky and how important it has been to human culture. Because it's so ingrained with our everyday life. And we think about time, like AM and PM are based on astronomy. The length of the day, the length of the month, the length of the year, that's based on astronomy. Finding your cardinal direction if you're lost, use astronomy, you know whether it's the sun during the day or the North Star or other stars. It is so inspiring to look up and to see a shooting star, or to see a meteor shower, or an eclipse, but also just in our everyday life. How you know from the beginning, people looked up and its astronomy, they called the oldest science, originally called astrology, before it was really a science. Just looking up at the sky and it how much it impacts our everyday life. So just going out and looking up to me is the big first step. Dave: You talked about your background earlier, so I...