This story aired in the December 4, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents.
Stargazing in San Francisco isn’t an easy feat—if light pollution doesn’t block out your view, the fog probably will. But that doesn’t deter the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers from trying, at City Star Parties they hold once a month. They’re part of a long history of Bay Area astronomers helping city dwellers take a peek into outer space.
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Story Transcript:
REPORTER: It’s just after sunset at the Presidio’s Tunnel Tops Park. There are about four or five people spread out a bit on the field; they’re unpacking tripods and fastening screws as they set up their equipment.
But they aren’t really paying attention to the jaw-dropping view of the Golden Gate Bridge in front of us. Their focus is distinctly upward.
IAN HERMAN: Right now I'm pointing at Venus over there. It's that bright dot.
REPORTER: Tonight is a City Star Party hosted by the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers. It’s a free monthly event where group members bring their telescopes to share with anyone who comes by and wants to look at the night sky.
HERMAN: I love star parties. They're like some of my favorite places to go.
REPORTER: Ian Herman’s dad drove him down from Santa Rosa, and at 12 he’s the youngest astronomer setting up here.
HERMAN: If my parents let me stay until 10, I'll look at Saturn.
REPORTER: I ask him if it felt weird to leave the darker sky up north and come to the city to look at the stars.
HERMAN: Well, in San Francisco, there's a lot of light pollution, so yeah, you can't see many stars. But for the planets it's gonna be great. I mean, we can still see some stuff.
REPORTER: Pretty soon, there are about 25 people here. They take turns stopping to look at whatever the telescopes are pointing at.
The biggest hit of the night seems to be the Ring Nebula, one of those colorful objects in deep space that you might hope to see at one of these events. Jason Griesbach is able to capture it through his high-tech telescope that’s hooked up to digital cameras and a computer.
JASON GRIESBACH: There are two eye pieces, so you can look through either one… You have to crouch a little bit.
JANE GALVAN: Oh, that is so cool! It's beautiful. Oh my goodness… It looks like two little rings. They're very small. It looks like—actually, what it looks like is the iris of an eye, so that you see these colors. It's red and blue or greenish. It's beautiful.
REPORTER: Jane Galvan said she and her husband just happened upon the star party on a walk after their anniversary dinner.
"So we walked down to Tunnel Tops, and we walked around, and we were like, what are all those people doing over there? And this is what we found. And it's amazing. Amazing. It's wonderful." -Jane Galvan
GALVAN: And we were like, what are all those people doing over there? And this is what we found. And it's amazing. Amazing. It's wonderful.
REPORTER: After I’ve peeked at the nebula for a while, I walk over to check in with Liam O’Brien, who organizes these public star parties. His motorized set up aims the telescope toward whatever he wants to look at. It’s now pointed directly overhead.
LIAM O’BRIEN: So this is actually M13.
REPORTER: M13 looks kind of like one fuzzy star, but it’s actually a bunch of stars that are pulled together by gravity. It’s also called the Hercules Cluster.
O’BRIEN: It is about 23,000 light years away. So the light that we're actually capturing with our camera and that we're seeing tonight, left there 23,000 years ago. What I like about astronomy is that you can actually time travel.
REPORTER: As we’re time traveling with Liam’s high-tech equipment, another astronomer walks by who is known to bring almost the opposite—a purposely low-tech, homemade telescope.
SCOTT MILLER: Hey, Liam.
O’BRIEN: Hey Scott. How's it going?
MILLER: Okay. It's been a while.
O’BRIEN: It's been a while!
REPORTER: Scott Miller actually started these City Star Parties almost a decade ago. But he hasn’t been coming as often lately, and he isn’t able to bring his DIY telescope because it doesn’t fit in his new car.
So a few days later, I visit him at home.
MILLER: I used to have a Volkswagen, a ‘68 Volkswagen bus that I had for 30 years... But now I have an electric car, and I'm looking at the newest model to see if I can fit the telescope in.
REPORTER: We go downstairs to the garage so he can show me why.
MILLER: So this is my 10 inch telescope that is a Dobsonian. And you can see its got a very simple mount, goes up and down side to side, and, uh, it's big, blue.
I think I painted my daughter’s dollhouse blue, and I had leftover paint. [laughs]And sometimes when I'm setting it up, people are very curious and they come over and they say, when are you gonna fire that thing? They think it's a cannon. [laughs]
REPORTER: And It does look like a cannon, with a cardboard tube that’s about six-feet-long pointed up on a diagonal. I ask him how much it weighs.
MILLER: Well, let's see if I can lift it. Oh, that's, that's about a little heavier than my grandchild [laughs], so I'd say maybe 70 pounds or so.
REPORTER: His Dobsonian telescope is named after the man who invented it—John Dobson. And it’s become a standard telescope design, especially for beginners. Miller actually made this telescope in a class taught by the inventor himself.
There’s a video of one of these classes online, where Dobson demonstrates how to grind glass for the telescope’s mirror.
MILLER: The telescopes that he designed were basically the reflector model that had been around for a long, long time. But he did something revolutionary—he made it a telescope for the people.
All you had to do with this telescope, set it down, point it to a star, and you're done. It was incredibly, incredibly simple. It revolutionized amateur astronomy throughout the world.
JOHN DOBSON [archival]: Come see the moon. Come see the moon. We got it at high power. We’re looking at the moon…
REPORTER: If you were in San Francisco anytime between the 1970s up through the 2010s, you might have seen John Dobson on a street corner, inviting people to look at the moon, or Saturn, or something else through his own hand-built telescope.
DOBSON [archival]: Come see the moon. Come see the moon. Yeah, come see the moon.
WOMAN [archival]: (looking through telescope) Thank you. That's awesome.
DOBSON [archival]: That's the way the moon would look. One hour before you landed on it. We’re looking at the moon!
REPORTER: We’re listening to footage from a 2005 documentary, where Dobson is set up on the corner of Sanchez and 24th Street. I actually saw him years ago in that same spot, with a crowd around him. He clearly liked cracking jokes—his sense of humor was just as big as his sense of wonder at the universe.
DOBSON [archival]: This runs on yogurt and eggs. [People around him laugh.] I eat the yogurt and eggs… As I always say, the exterior decorator does lovely work. [Laugh.]
WOMAN [archival]: (looking through telescope) I've never seen that before. That is absolutely incredible.
REPORTER: Dobson was a former Vedanta monk; in 1968, he founded the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers, which is different from the group that now runs the star parties.
And from then on, Dobson devoted his life to helping people look at the sky.
DOBSON [archival]: You see, the importance of a telescope is not on how big it is. It's not how well made it is. It's how many people, less fortunate than you, got to look through it.
REPORTER: Dobson traveled the world with his telescopes, and the Sidewalk Astronomers grew from a handful of enthusiasts in San Francisco to become a global grassroots movement, with chapters in 17 countries across every continent but Antarctica.
He died in 2014—at the age of 98—and soon after that, Scott Miller discovered that the official San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers seemed to have fizzled out. So instead, he joined the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers, which had been around since 1952.
But their main stargazing event was a private affair for members, held in a restricted area on Mount Tam that allowed them to be “above the fog.”
MILLER: I found out that there was nothing—there were no public events here in the city, so [though] my initiative and maybe some of the other astronomers, we decided: Let's start City Star Parties.
REPORTER: Since then, the San Francisco Amateur Astronomers continue to hold private “above the fog” events at Mt. Tam and also monthly public star parties like this one.
And of course, this star party isn’t the only place where the spirit of John Dobson lives on locally. Observatories across the Bay Area host public stargazing events. Or you might even know about some local amateur astronomers in your neighborhood who bring their telescopes out to the sidewalk to share the cosmos with the public.
Whether it’s a high-tech digital telescope or a hand-painted Dobsonian, they’re all good reminders of how important it can be sometimes, to just look up.
If you are interested in joining the star parties we have links below.
Website for The San Francisco Amateur Astronomers and follow them on their Instagram.
