Schoolchildren spend the day under the stars

Stargazing isn't what it used to be, unless maybe you have a trampoline or a portable planetarium.

Few kids entertain themselves these days by looking for mythical creatures in the sky, and many parents have little to tell their children about the constellations.

Still, Katie Ferraro, a second-grader at Hofstetter Elementary in Colville, remembers seeing the Big Dipper while she was bouncing on her trampoline. Her brother thought she was wrong, but she knew better.

What she didn't know at the time was that Native Americans looked at the same group of stars and saw three mighty hunters who got caught in the sky while chasing four elk. The hunters are the handle of the dipper while the elk are the cup.

Dan Gravett, a roving instructor from the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, offered a traditional Native American explanation for the nighttime sky this week as Ferraro and her classmates prepared to enter one of two portable planetariums.

With openings too low for even a second-grader to stand up, the inflatable plastic domes resembled big gray igloos. So the kids had to "duck walk" in and sit "crisscross, applesauce" around an electric campfire while a projector displayed stars on the ceiling.

Gravett said legend has it that the sky used to be too low for people to stand up straight. Indians all across the country got together to push the sky up with long poles - on the same day the three elk hunters were pursuing their prey. The hunters and the elk were pushed so far away they couldn't get back.

Next door, in the other igloo, another class saw what the ancient Greeks and Romans imagined the stars to represent. In some cases, the ancients of both continents saw much the same thing, such as a hunter with a belt whose name was either Orion or Long Sash or, in Navajo, Atsheh Ats'ozi.

But everyone's constellations require a great deal of imagination. The dog 7-year-old Donovan Montoya thought he saw was about as convincing as anything the ancients saw, and it would have been hard to fault classmate Ashlen Beckley's perception of a hairless, one- eyed face. There was a giant "ooh," though, when Gravett flipped a switch that connected the dots and fleshed out the Native American constellations. A giant rattlesnake - Hydra, to ancient Greeks - twisted through a sky that also was populated by bears, dogs, a huge "thunderbird" and hunters.

"I liked it when I saw the guy standing on the snake," Garth Vaagen said back in the classroom when teacher Deborah Schaller called for a quick review.

Dillon Croy said he liked "the dog with an apple on its nose," prompting an enthusiastic, "Oh, yeah," from Vaagen. The apple was an unusually bright star named Sirius.

The belt of a hunter known as Long Sash to some Native Americans, and as Orion in the Greco-Roman world, points to Sirius. Elsewhere in the artificial sky, a native man and woman twirled around the North Star, which was known as the "home fire" because it is the only star that doesn't move.

"I thought we were spinning around," Biagio Pietroburgo said later. "It made my stomach feel squishy."

Almost all of his classmates agreed that parents don't have much to say about creatures in the sky. Surprisingly, though, his and other classes were able to summon a wealth of information about the constellations.

Classmate Ryan Rackham recalled a story his dad told him about Zeus asking a fellow for help and, upon being refused, turning the fellow's daughters into a cluster of stars called the Seven Sisters. The cluster also is known as Pleiades or, in Japan, Subaru. The constellation is the symbol of the namesake Japanese automobiles.

In a third-grade class, 8-year-old Sarah Bryant recalled a story she heard in first grade in Hoquiam, Wash., about two sisters in the sky who were protected by a bull when a Greek warrior frightened them.

Her classmate Nathan Cline told a Chinese story about a man and woman in the stars who were brought together by Father Time and Mother Nature. He couldn't remember where he heard the story, but "I think it was in Kansas or someplace."

Or perhaps it was at the Pacific Science Center planetarium in Seattle, where his twin brother, Tyler, heard a story about Zeus waking up cranky and wrestling a bear for three days and nights. Zeus - "they called him like the god of the gods" - was so impressed with the bear that he gave the bruin a place in the sky, Tyler said.

Homework for Hofstetter students this week is to gaze at some stars and share some legends with parents.

Meanwhile, the traveling astronomy lesson moves to Colville's Aster Elementary and Fort Colville Middle School.

Copyright 2001 Cowles Publishing Company
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