Ottawa residents will have the chance to take a peek at the night sky through “pop-up telescopes” on four Thursdays this winter at the National Gallery of Canada.
The free stargazing events are being organized by Pop Scope, a grassroots movement started by amateur astronomers in Ottawa.
The first Pop Scope pop-up telescope event was held at the gallery Nov. 12.
“We were wondering what we were going to do in winter and where we were going to be able to do astronomy,” says Adrian Ocneanu, an Ottawa Pop Scope leader.
Ocneanu says with a spacious foyer and free admission on Thursdays, the gallery is an ideal location for wintertime Pop Scope events.
An engineer and PhD candidate at Carleton University, Ocneanu says taking astronomy to the streets brings people together.
“It’s a beautiful hobby to have. It’s social, you meet all walks of life,” he says. “You go from being a perfect stranger with someone right beside you to five minutes later their hearts and souls are on the table and yours is as well.”
Pop Scope was founded in 2014 after two friends, Michael O’Shea and Viva Dadwal, bought a cheap telescope from Craigslist and decided to test it out.
“When we were doing that, this guy stopped by, probably homeless, and started sharing all this information about Jupiter,” says O’Shea.
“We thought, wait a minute, here is a guy who we may not think is an astronomer, but knows a lot.”
O’Shea says he and Dadwal, civil servants at the time, found there was a growing interest in their sidewalk astronomy sessions and applied for funding from the Awesome Foundation to purchase more telescopes.
“On a whim we applied and we got a $1,000 grant,” says O’Shea. “We bought three different telescopes and went around Ottawa trying to engage people in astronomy.
Equipped with their high-tech telescopes and a team of volunteers, Pop Scope took off in Ottawa, holding regular sky-watching sessions free to the public.
Dadwal says as Pop Scope quickly expanded, the team decide to focus on three core values: community, science, and public spaces.
“It’s about connecting on a very human level, looking up at the sky and kind of being confused by it all,” says Dadwal. “And I think we do a good job being confused together, because we’re all not experts.”
She adds: “We want to bring people together through something completely random,”
The two friends have since left Ottawa’s Pop Scope in Ocneanu’s hands, O’Shea having moved to Philadelphia and Dadwal to Baltimore, where each of them created new Pop Scope chapters.
After a year of bringing the night sky closer to Earth, Pop Scope is also reaching out to its youngest future astronomers.
The organization has partnered with schools in Philadelphia and Assumption Catholic School in Ottawa to bring the universe into the classroom.
“We want to informally complement the formal work of the science centres and museums and the schools to see if we can take the seriousness out of science in a way,” Dadwal says.
“Historically, people came together and learned stuff by looking up,” she adds.
Gary Boyle, an Ottawa-based astronomy educator and columnist for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, says interest in the night sky starts young.
“Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were 13 and 14 years old when Apollo was launched. I’m sure the ‘wow’ moment impressed them to go on and create what they did,” he says.
“Everyone is a small astronomer to some extent,” Boyle adds.
The next Pop Scope events will be held Jan. 14, Feb. 18, and March 17 from 5 to 8 p.m. at the National Gallery.