Beyond the Fog: Celebrating the Night Sky at The Lawrence

The stars may have been hidden, but there was still plenty to discover at The Lawrence.

Astronomy enthusiasts journeyed into the Berkeley hills on the evening of August 12 for The Lawrence’s Perseid Meteor Shower Star Party, ready to catch one of the year’s most anticipated meteor showers. Telescopes were set up, lawn chairs were spread out, and hot cocoa was ready for a night beneath the stars.

There was just one problem: the stars were nowhere to be seen.

A thick blanket of fog had settled over the East Bay, obscuring the view of the night sky almost entirely. But despite the less-than-ideal stargazing conditions, visitors still turned out for an evening of astronomy, activities and conversations about the nighttime world — from meteors streaking through space to moths navigating closer to the ground.

UC Berkeley astronomer Dr. Bryan Mendez didn’t keep the crowd gathered outside in suspense.

“We are not going to see anything tonight,” Mendez told visitors. “That is the nature of astronomy.”

Instead, the fog became part of the lesson. Mendez explained that while telescopes using some longer wavelengths of light can see through clouds, visible light cannot. It’s one reason astronomers put telescopes on mountaintops — and in space — to get above the clouds that can obscure our view from Earth.

And even if visitors couldn’t see the celestial event happening above them, they could still learn what was going on beyond the fog.

Meteors, Mendez explained, are small pieces of rock and dust traveling through space. When they encounter Earth’s atmosphere at high speeds, they rapidly heat the surrounding air, producing the bright streak commonly called a shooting star. While meteors can appear on any clear night, meteor showers occur when Earth passes through a cloud of dust typically left behind by a comet.

The Perseids return each August as Earth travels through debris left behind by Comet Swift-Tuttle. During a good meteor shower, Mendez said, observers might see a shooting star every minute or two — and they’d better be paying attention.

“Sometimes they’re so fast that by the time you can say, ‘Oh, there’s one,’ it’s already gone,” Mendez said.

Without meteors to point out overhead, the talk became a wide-ranging conversation between Mendez and the crowd. Visitors asked whether shooting stars can make sounds, how astronomers know when a meteor shower will happen, how scientists determine the ages of stars and even what will happen when the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies eventually collide.

Nearby, Planetarium Director Emeritus Alan Gould offered another way to see what was hiding beyond the clouds, sharing images captured by telescopes at previous star parties. One showed a globular cluster filled with some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, while another revealed the Eagle Nebula, a vast region of gas and dust where new stars are forming.

“The sky is really pretty at all scales,” Mendez said. “When you look at it just with your own eyes, it’s beautiful to look at. And then when you take a telescope and dig deeper, it’s also really pretty.”

There was plenty to discover closer to Earth, too.

Science Hero Dr. Signe White introduced visitors to the world of moths, creatures that play an important role in ecosystems after the sun goes down.

“Moths are obviously a huge part of the nighttime ecosystem,” White said.

At her station, visitors could examine specimens under a microscope, revealing the tiny individual scales covering their wings. White explained that scales are a defining feature of moths and butterflies, while moths can also have distinctive features like feathered antennae.

The specimens challenged another common perception about the insects.

“This is basically to show you how beautiful and flamboyant moths can be,” White said. “They’re not always super brown or gray.”

Around the rest of The Lawrence, families designed stars and added wishes to the growing Lawrence Galaxy, explored how the weight of an object changes on different planets, and took the Planetarium dome for a spin during Planetarium Pilots.

Later in the evening, ‘ottoy Initiative leaders Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino invited the crowd back outside to consider the night sky through generations of Ohlone observation and knowledge.

And once again, the fog became part of the story.

Medina began by teaching the crowd the Chochenyo word for the fog surrounding them, explaining how the marine layer moves inland from the Pacific Ocean, across San Francisco Bay and into the East Bay hills. Far from simply getting in the way of the evening’s stargazing, he explained, the fog cools the region and provides moisture that helps plants and other forms of life thrive.

“I want to acknowledge the gifts of šiitiš right here as we’re surrounded by its beauty,” Medina said.

From there, Medina shared some of the ways Ohlone people have long looked to the sky to understand time, seasons, food gathering and the natural world.

The Big Dipper, known in Chochenyo as ‘uuruš, for example, can function as a clock. By observing its movement across the sky, Ohlone people can determine the time during the night. The arrival of the Pleiades, or tawšiikišmak, in the fall signal the beginning of acorn-gathering season, while their disappearance in the spring coincides with the time to gather materials for basketry.

Medina also described the connection between the moon, or kormey, and life around San Francisco Bay. Its waxing and waning marked cycles of time, while the changing tides it produces helped determine when Ohlone people traditionally entered marshes to harvest shellfish or traveled onto the bay to fish..

“Those stars, they have a way of communicating with us,” Medina said, “teaching us that the universe up above us — it’s not an inanimate scene, but it has agency.”

By the time the Star Party came to a close, the fog hadn’t budged. Visitors never got the sweeping view of the Perseids they had come hoping to see.

But that didn’t stop them from spending the evening looking a little closer.

They traveled from the microscopic scales of a moth’s wing to clusters containing millions of stars, learned why pieces of comet dust produce streaks of light across our atmosphere and heard how generations of Ohlone people have carefully observed the sky to understand the rhythms of life here in the East Bay.

And on a night when almost nothing was visible overhead, Medina offered a fitting reminder.

“Just because you can’t see something, doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

The Perseids may have remained hidden beyond the fog, but there was still an entire nighttime world waiting to be discovered.