In the oldest municipal observatory in Iowa, a crowd gathers every Friday at 8 p.m. to learn about astronomy, history and science. The fall lecture series at the Drake Municipal Observatory, two miles from campus in the Waveland Golf Course, began Sept. 19 and will run until Nov. 7 before starting again in the spring. The lectures are free and open to the general public.
Herb Folsom, a former Drake astronomy professor who is in charge of public outreach for the Drake Municipal Observatory, proposed adding winter sessions in the future. The winter program would include one or two sessions in January and February and would begin next school year.
Anthony J. Zarzycki recently moved to Des Moines and began volunteering at the Drake Municipal Observatory. He studied astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University.
“[Penn State] had observatories, but they weren’t open to the public, and so I was really happy to see that there was an observatory that was open to the general public and oriented towards educating the general people of Des Moines,” Zarzycki said.
Folsom is the current speaker for these lectures. He took over three years ago with the intention of keeping the program running. Folsom said that he enjoys lecturing because of the people who come.
“A lot of our guests, they come out from a long way off,” Folsom said. “Sometimes it’s hard for them to get here, but I talked to the man who did this before and he said, ‘it’s not me, it’s not you, it’s this place that draws people in.’”
There were many regular attendees of the session on Friday, Oct. 3, including Mila and Ruby, who travel all the way from Ames to visit the observatory. They first started coming as a way to relieve stress.
“Some people, they use stargazing for healing depression or grief, especially people who lost a loved one, and they have a whole center of grief,” Mila said. “Looking in the stars, it’s a part of the human experience. Getting married, having children, spending time outside at night looking at stars, is a human experience. And we lost that because we don’t see stars, it’s too bright at nighttime, and we’re missing that.”
The public lecture room, an unusual feature for an observatory, was filled with attendees ranging from their teenage years to their 90s. They listened intently to Folsom’s lecture while surrounded by detailed photographs of the moon, nebulae and other features of the night sky.
“There’s a few regulars that come in every week, there’s a few that come in every once in a while, but there’s always maybe a quarter to a third of the people that have never been here before,” Folsom said.
After the lecture, people were encouraged to explore the observatory, including the observing room, home to a 1894 telescope. Up a steep, spiral staircase sits a dome, 18 feet in diameter. Surrounding the dome is a balcony that allows for a high vantage point, providing a clear view of the night sky, free from light obstruction.
Friday night’s lecture was about the Herschels, a family of German astronomers most famous for their discoveries in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
“I’ve been sprinkling in a little bit more history of the place and the history of astronomy,” Folsom said. “But, next couple of weeks, certainly, it’ll be purely scientific stuff.”
Future topics will include ‘Are We Inside a Gigantic Black Hole?’ and ‘The History of Spectroscopy’ featuring a guest speaker, Dr. Robinson Yost. Yost is a history professor at Kirkwood Community College who studied physics and mathematics as an undergraduate before switching to history of science in grad school.
