Starting this Saturday, Griffith Observatory will be holding their monthly Star Parties.
No, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are not coming. Instead, you’ll experience “the real stars of Los Angeles,” according to Griffith Observatory Deputy Director Mark Pine.
“Once a month, we get a bunch of volunteers from the Los Angeles Astronomical Society, Sidewalk Astronomers, The Planetary Society together. So there's like two dozen telescopes on the lawn, in addition to our own,” he says. “And so people have all sorts of choices about not only what they look at in the sky, but what they look through to see the sky.”
These monthly parties start at 2 p.m. and end at 9:45 p.m. In the daytime, people visiting the Observatory can look at the sun and other bright objects through telescopes with filters. At night, people can see notable stars, planets, and maybe a galaxy – even with the light pollution in LA.
Pine, who used to work at NASA, says that observing a star or a planet yourself is a vastly different experience from looking at a photograph of it.
“I would get to see pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope before they were released to the public, including one that I remember very clearly of Saturn. … And then I first came to Griffith Observatory about 30 years ago. And I looked through the Zeiss Telescope at Saturn. And obviously, it's much smaller, [with] much less detail. But I was doing it myself,” he says.
It’s for this reason, Pine adds, that there even is an observatory in “light-soaked Los Angeles.”