Follow Orion’s belt upwards to the Taurus constellation and you might be able to see a small group of bright blue dots — a cluster of stars called the Pleiades. For the ancient Greeks, this cluster was known as the Seven Sisters, after the titan Atlas’ seven daughters. In Japan, the Pleiades have appeared in literature since the eighth century under the name Subaru.
“So these completely different civilizations looked at the same stars and saw two different things,” Shawn Kathuria PO ’27 said, standing in Pomona College’s planetarium and pointing to a projected image of the Pleiades.
On Friday, April 18, Kathuria led third graders from Mt. Baldy School through stories about the stars and astronomical phenomena. Friday’s program is the last in a series of educational planetarium shows that Kathuria and faculty in the physics and astronomy department have put on for Mt. Baldy School elementary schoolers, bringing in the entire school over the course of the semester.
“All throughout human history, every civilization, every person who’s ever lived has looked to the sky and seen all these stars and asked themselves, what are these things? What am I looking at? What stories are we trying to tell?” Kathuria continued. “And they look at the same stars in the same sky and they tell stories about their families, about their heroes and their gods, and they pass them down by generation.”
Though built in 2015, the planetarium has in recent years been largely unknown and unused outside of Pomona’s physics and astronomy department. Last fall, Kathuria and Elijah Quetin, visiting instructor in the department, sought to change that by revamping the facility as a tool for public audiences and local communities.
“The goal is … that we build a kind of robust system that can survive students coming and leaving and graduating and all that,” Quetin said. “It’s just this amazing resource that I think we’ve been underutilizing.”
In rethinking the planetarium, Quetin and Kathuria have aimed to make it a point of connection between Pomona students, local communities and the night sky.
Nez Evans PO ’23, a lab assistant at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has assisted with Pomona’s telescopes and planetarium since before Kathuria and Quetin began expanding the planetarium’s use. Evans described the value of the program in making astronomy and physics accessible.
“One of the things that I hope a lot of the astronomy students get, or people who visit the planetarium get, is just a sense that everything is connected.”
“[The planetarium is] a way to get people into the field in general, because a lot of people don’t have access to this, there’s quite a barrier to entry,” Evans said. “So getting people interested in it in the first place, but like learning about how you can go one step further and explore the more in-depth aspects of space and also just the night sky in general.”
Spaces like Pomona’s planetarium are increasingly important as the stars become less and less visible to the naked eye.
“It’s a little more difficult for people in the area to get that sort of experience [of the stars] in general, mostly because you can’t really see stars around LA,” Evans said.
Pomona’s planetarium is one of the few astronomy resources that exist for Mt. Baldy students nearby, according to Ashley Haines, teacher and President of the Mt. Baldy Parent Teacher Association. Haines also noted her appreciation for the planetarium as a way that Mt. Baldy kids can see themselves within a college setting and the scientific field.
“It’s great for kids to be able to see the different resources that are available and imagine themselves in a place like this, once they graduate from high school,” Haines said.
As the planetarium show began, the kids called out questions to Kathuria — how old he was, and if they could see dinosaurs — before being quieted down. As he spoke, the planetarium screen lit up into a night sky.
“So even as you’re sitting here in the planetarium today, you’re part of a cycle, something bigger than yourself. That involves the sky, the sun, the earth, but more importantly, you,” Kathuria said.
For Kathuria and Quetin, the planetarium is a way of letting students, whether from Pomona or Mt. Baldy School, experience a phenomenal universe larger than themselves.
“One of the things that I hope a lot of the astronomy students get, or people who visit the planetarium get, is just a sense that everything is connected,” Quetin said. “Even though these distant stars and planets seem so sort of abstract and far away, they’re actually affecting us every day, whether we realize it or not. It’s also like our origin story, that we came from the universe and we’re a part of the universe.”
In the modern day, millions of light years away from the Pleiades and thousands of years since early civilization began inventing stories about the stars, tools like the planetarium help to bring us closer to this origin story.
“It was like we were once upon a time connected to the sky and the sun and the stars and the world around us, and now we’re not, unless you’re an astrophysicist or someone who’s interested in the stars,” Kathuria said. “I like the idea of preserving the human tradition of being in tune with the stars, and I think when we deviate from that it’s a sign that we’re losing our humanity, and that to me is a scary prospect.”
The show ended with a video about Hawaiian wayfinding, a living tradition of open-ocean navigation that uses the stars as guides. Before the elementary schoolers left the planetarium, Kathuria asked them to look closely at the sky that night.
“If you can tonight, see if you can maybe find Orion. It’ll be right after sunset. And just remember that when you’re looking in the sky, you’re looking at the same stars that every human ever lived has,” he said.
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