A night at the planetarium.
By Lily Ouellet
The dome goes black, closing over us like an eyelid. I raise my hand in front of my face and it vanishes, existing now only as a shadow against the stars that begin to appear behind it on the planetarium screen. First, there’s only a handful, then a hundred, and as the presenter begins to speak in the center of the room, the stars grow by the millions into instantly recognizable clumps—a scorpion, a lion, a spoon. I forget the itchy theater seat digging into my neck—I’m in the middle of the Milky Way, alongside the speaking astrophysicist exploring the edges of black holes, orbits of exoplanets, and clouds of nebulae.
This isn’t any planetarium show, but Astronomy Live. Once a month, the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History opens its doors after hours for astrophysicists to showcase their latest research by visualizing it on the famous domed screen. However, it differs from most research presentations in that the audience isn’t full of scientists, but students escaping from class, older couples in matching tweed coats, and tourists stumbling in for a rare moment of solitude. The only prerequisite for attendance is curiosity.
I first started coming to Astronomy Live as a freshman. I had gotten a ticket in a fit of frustration—sitting through Calculus lectures in the tailbone-crushing wooden seats of the Mathematics basement had drained me of all the enthusiasm for learning I’d brought to college. There was always a faint clicking sound and the smell of weed. No one ever talked, myself included. In these giant math classes, taking up class time with your own voice feels sacrilegious, an action underscoring the unspoken but sacred doctrine that underscores most undergraduate lectures: Professors talk and students write. Even in STEM fields that are purportedly about discovery, nearly every lecture, assignment, and jumble of office hours is solely concerned with jumping the next curricular hurdle. The varying passions we declare in our admissions essays are muffled, lost in a system where achievement, not curiosity, takes precedence.
llustration by Ines Alto
When the show ends, the stars on the dome disappear, and the image shifts to Earth, zooming down onto the museum until we’re looking at it from above. It seems insignificantly small. The lights come up, and I rub my eyes, a bit dizzy. In the last ten minutes, the astrophysicist opens the floor for questions. They come from all directions—sharp inquiries about the existence of aliens, playful “what-ifs” about the multiverse, and probes into the accuracy of Interstellar. To the astrophysicist, I suspect they’re all extremely trivial. Still, she answers each with contagious enthusiasm, untangling the most complex scientific theories with accessible analogies, comparing gravity to the interaction between a spider-web and a marble. The people asking questions, however, are what surprise me the most—they aren’t here for a connection or class, but because they’ve let themselves be drawn to learning for the sake of it, viewing their ignorance as a catalyst for wonder rather than an omen foretelling the doom of a B minus. Here, curiosity is more alive than I’ve seen it in months, in stark contrast to the structures I’ve been taught to value.
When I leave, I feel a little lighter, more connected to that initial spark that made me apply to Columbia. I realize how often I reduce my own learning to deadlines and grades (as much as I promised myself I wouldn’t), and more importantly, that celebrating my curiosity in its simple existence is a silent revolt against this. Astronomy Live is learning without expectations or demands. It’s a freedom that’s rarely remembered, but constantly missed.
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