Four Fridays, One Lecture Hall, and a Telescope Waiting on the Lawn
There is a particular kind of Murfreesboro evening that costs nothing and is easy to miss. It happens on the first Friday of the month, in a lecture room on Old Main Circle, and it ends outside in the dark with people taking turns at a telescope.
MTSU's Friday Star Party season opened last night. Three dates remain before the semester runs out.
The format has not changed in years, because it works. A faculty member from the university's Department of Physics and Astronomy gives a talk at 6:30 p.m. in Room 102 of Wiser-Patten Science Hall, 422 Old Main Circle. The talk is pitched at whoever walks in — no ticket, no registration, no age limit, and no assumption that you ever took a physics class. Afterward, weather permitting, the nearby MTSU Observatory opens and the telescopes come out. If the sky is socked in, you still got the lecture.
Parking is the detail that trips up first-timers: it is free on campus after 4:30 p.m. on Fridays, and the closest lots sit on the north side of Alumni Drive.
Here is what is left this fall.
Oct. 2 — Gregg McPherson, “The Science of Disaster Movies.” The one to bring a teenager to.
Nov. 6 — John Wallin, “Chasing Eclipses.” Middle Tennessee has standing to talk about this. In August 2017 a total solar eclipse tracked across this part of the state and effectively ended the workday from Clarksville to Cookeville, with schools letting out early and half the region standing in parking lots wearing cardboard glasses.
Dec. 4 — Irina Perevalova, on a topic chosen by public vote.
That last one is the most charming thing about the series. Once a semester the department simply hands the subject over to the audience and lets people pick what they want explained.
The season opened Sept. 4 with Erik Monson on “X-Raying the Cosmos: The How and Why of X-Ray Astronomy.” Monson previously worked with the ACIS group at Penn State — the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer, one of the instruments aboard NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Chandra has spent more than twenty-five years photographing the parts of the universe the human eye is simply not built to register: matter falling into black holes, the expanding wreckage of exploded stars, gas drifting between galaxies at millions of degrees. It is a good reminder that “looking at the sky” has meant something much stranger than starlight for a long time now.
It is worth saying plainly what a series like this is for. Murfreesboro has grown enormously, and growth brings light — parking lots, signage, subdivisions, headlights, all of it thrown upward into a sky that was genuinely dark over Rutherford County farmland within living memory. The stars a child sees from a driveway off Medical Center Parkway are not the stars their grandparents saw from the same ground. A university with a decent telescope, a lecture hall, and an open door is one small way of handing some of that back for an evening.
Bring a jacket for October onward. The observatory portion happens outdoors, and the whole point is standing still in the dark.
Star Parties are held on the first Fridays of the fall and spring semesters, and they are free and open to all ages. Looking for more to do around town? Start with our local's guide to Murfreesboro.
