Meeting by Zoom
Agenda:
7:00 - 7:30 General Meeting & Announcements 7:30 - 7:45 Refreshments 7:45 - Public Presentation
Speaker: Rader Lane
Park Ranger (I) - Night Sky Lead, Grand Canyon National Park
Topic: Ancient Skies: Cultural Astronomy of the Grand Canyon Region
Description of Talk:
Practically every culture on Earth has watched the astronomical clockwork of the sky in order to produce calendars for religious and agricultural purposes. The tribes of the Grand Canyon region are another beautiful expression of this universal truth. The beauty of cultural astronomy is to witness the myriad ways that peoples from around the world express that shared awe, connection, and need, for the heavens above. A deep part of our fascination for celestial phenomena and the night sky is informed and dependent upon cultural understandings.
To properly appreciate a region and the night sky is to appreciate how the people of the region used that specific landscape as a palette to understand the cosmos and how the cosmos, in turn, reflects the landscape and the people. Grand Canyon region is unique in that some of the tribes here have very intact cultural traditions largely untouched by the western world until the mid-nineteenth century which has allowed ethnographers to capture this expression better than most places. As we will see, this region is archeoastronomically richer than most places in the world.
About the Speaker:
Rader Lane is a ranger naturalist at Grand Canyon National Park. He manages the outreach and interpretive portion of the Dark Skies Program and coordinates the world famous Grand Canyon Star Party. Rader was awarded the National Park Service's National Freeman Tilden Award in 2019 for his interpretive work on night skies in our national parks.