KERMAN, Calif. - On a recent night, Luke Lopez looked up at the vast dark sky and his imagination got to work.
“I saw one yellow star and one blue star,” Lopez said. “One thing that automatically went to my mind: Sonic and Tails. They’re in the sky.”
More than 400 people including Lopez gathered for a rare event called a “star party.” It took place on the Kerman High School football field. The lights were off, because the real show was up above.
With the help of the Central Valley Astronomers, families, students, and stargazers of all ages were getting the chance to look deep into space through powerful electronic telescopes.
“We can point the telescope to somewhere in the sky that you think is completely empty…and sure enough, you can see some amazing things,” says Brian Bellis, vice president and event coordinator of the Central Valley Astronomers organization. “Star clusters, nebulas, other galaxies, it’s really fabulous.”
Bellis and other volunteers from the group helped visitors view sights like the moon, Mars, and the Hercules Cluster, a tight group of about a quarter of a million stars. Many of the telescopes were the size of cannons, guided precisely by maps on tablets.
The Central Valley Astronomers host dozens of events year-round, like club meetings to sidewalk star parties.
Typically, star parties are hosted in places with less light pollution, like Millerton Lake, or more people, like Fresno’s River Park shopping center.
But for many in Kerman, this was their first time being able to see stars this way.
Many kids described what they saw.
“Lots of stars… I love the stars, it’s so cool,” said Jaycen Enriquez.
Ashlyn Landa’s favorite was the Swan’s Eye. “It’s like two stars, it’s a blue one and a yellow one,” she says.
Young Mia Rubalcava details one view through the telescope as “sort of like a big star, but it was made up of little stars and it all kind of looked like a blur.”
And according to Alexa Parra, Mars through the telescope presents the planet in a dusty orange color that she rarely sees with her own bare eyes.
Kerman High School teacher Taylor Salazar helped bring this event to life.
She teaches earth and space science and wants her students, and the wider community, to experience astronomy beyond what they see in textbooks and online.
“We see things up in the sky and they seem so abstract,” Salazar says. “To try to make something less abstract and really touch the community and the students, I wanted to put on this event so they could see with their own eyes.”
After a successful event last year that was open only to students, the school invested in three telescopes through funding from the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP).
This year, the event expanded and was open to the public at no cost.
With music playing from the press box speakers and food trucks parked at one end, the turnout was grand and resembled a typical crowd for a football match.
But on this night, the competition was only between the galaxies and the mind – and between curiosity and imagination. All of the wonder was brought down for a brief moment to this small town.
Salazar hopes to grow the event even more in the future.
“I’m thinking maybe we can do a “movie under the stars” with telescope viewing too,” she says.
