Activites: Stories: UU Astronomers

			Activities: Stories: UU Astronomers

Astronomers - UU heroes ( Maria Mitchell, Clyde Tombaugh)

From: KayeUU LSA

I brought in a real telescope for a prop, and also had everyone in the congregation make their own "telescope" with their hands and look around the room. Here's the gist of the story. Feel free to use and adapt.

"Shoot for the moon -- the worst that can happen is that you end up somewhere in the stars" (Bill Demby)

Does anybody know what this is? (Telescope!) What does it do? You can make your own telescope! (Show how, with hands, and ask congregation to do it and look around the room.)

One night a couple of months ago my daughter and I went outside with her telescope to take a look at the Hale-Bopp comet. Well, we couldn't get the telescope to work just right, but it didn't matter because we could see it anyway. How many of you saw the comet when it was here? Who can tell us how it got its name, Hale-Bopp?

Some things are either close enough or bright enough that we can see them just by looking up in the night sky. But some things are so dark or so far away that we can only see them by looking through telescopes. Did you know that two Unitarian Universalists made some important discoveries by looking through telescopes? I'd like to tell you about them.

About 150 years ago, in 1847, a young woman by the name of Maria Mitchell was studying the night sky with her telescope when she discovered a brand new comet that had never been seen before. In fact, you could only see this comet by looking through a telescope. It was the first comet like that ever discovered. The comet was named after Maria -- it was called the Mitchell Comet. It was the first time a comet had been named after a woman!

Maria went on to become the first woman astronomy professor in America, and she was the first woman in the Academy of Arts and Sciences. Maria had loved to learn about the stars ever since she was a little girl, growing up on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts. Maria was a Unitarian.

Now, about 80 years later, in 1930, a man by the name of Clyde Tombaugh was studying the night skies in Arizona with the help of a bigger telescope, and he made an exceptional discovery. He discovered a whole planet -- the 9th planet in our solar system and the one that's farthest away. Does anyone know its name? Pluto! That wasn't Clyde's only important discovery, however. The next year he discovered an asteroid! And, just like Maria's comet, this asteroid was named after Clyde. It became known as the Tombaugh Asteroid. Clyde was a Unitarian Universalist.

So, sometimes when I'm out at night and I look out at the stars, I think about Maria and Clyde. I wonder if they thought about the same kinds of things I like to think about. I wonder if they got excited when they learned something new about the universe like I do. I wonder what they thought about being Unitarian Universalists and what their religion meant to them as astronomers. And... I wonder where the Mitchell Comet and the Tombaugh Asteroid are now.

It's a big and wonderful universe we live in, isn't it?

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