A soft snow fell as a few hundred people gathered on Flagstaff’s Mars Hill on Saturday morning to inaugurate the $53 million Marley Foundation Astronomy Discovery Center.
The site offers an outdoor rooftop planetarium complete with heated seats, a large theatre and an Orbits Curiosity Zone with a slide that your correspondent’s daughter would not step away from.
There’s also a small restaurant and an astronomy gallery, where Oliver and father Scott Barrows experimented with a light refraction exhibit demonstrating the effects of lenses on light.
"I am changing the shape of this light right here," Oliver said. "It makes red, green and blue and then a tiny bit of gold."
"There’s a lot of cool experiments you can do with the pieces they have set up here," her dad said.
Flagstaff mayor Becky Daggett experimented with a microphone broadcasting her voice into outer space.
"I mean here we stand and it asks us, if you could ask aliens one question, what would it be? And how can we send a message that extra terrestrial life would understand?"
She taps a screen and leans into the exhibit’s microphone to send her message to the universe.
"Hello, I am just a novice trying to understand the expanse of the universe. And I live in a little town called Flagstaff, Arizona, and we are surrounded by very smart scientists who have made all kinds of discoveries here. And I’ve wondered what you’ve discovered. And if you come to Earth, I would welcome you, and I hope that it’s not like Independence Day," she said.
The message is sent into space with a UFO-esque whoosh.
"Oh, that is so cool," Daggett said, laughing. "I’m overwhelmed with this entire center. And I’m overwhelmed with watching the little kids run around and touch everything. And it’s just spectacular."
That’s the reaction Lowell Observatory’s founder, Percival Lowell, would have wanted, says the observatory’s sole trustee, William Lowell Putnam.
"He had a term for it called co-discovery, and it it was the idea that the best person to engage with the public about science was the scientist themself, the person who made these discoveries and to give people that moment of new understanding, new knowledge," he said.
Celebrities also joined the inauguration. David Levy is an Arizona-based astronomer who in the early 1990s helped discover the Shoemaker-Levy 9, the brilliant comet that orbited Jupiter before colliding into the planet. At the time, the comet rendered some of the most dramatic sights of the planet since Galileo first turned his own telescope on it more than 400 years ago.
Levy described what this new center means for him.
"I’ll give you a very personal answer to that question. My life has been difficult since I lost my Wendee a couple of years ago, and there’ve been very bad days and very good days. This is one of the best."
He leaned back on the bench we sat at.
"And it’s because I think this is something that even if she had been alive, she would not have wanted to make the trip up the mountain because of the difficulty for her. But she would have wanted me to go and I would have gone. But without her, all I have are the happy memories, and they’re just adding to the joy being at this observatory right now."
You can purchase tickets to visit the center at the observatory’s website.
