This story was originally published in Coast Reporter's winter edition of Coast Life magazine.
It’s a clear-skied June night on the scrubby slopes above Wilson Creek, and David Bowie’s Starman is blaring from battery-powered loudspeakers. Dozens of spectators lounge on lawn chairs, wrapped in blankets to stave off the chill of late spring. Each one has navigated a constellation of unlit gravel lanes stemming from the Sunshine Coast highway, past the chain link periphery of the airport. At every crossroad, a hand-lettered sign bears a single word: observatory.
DJ E-List raises the volume. “There’s a starman waiting in the sky / He’d like to come and meet us,” wails Bowie. Drag performer Davis Gay, drenched in crimson nightvision floodlight, rests on the railing of the wooden structure that houses a 14-inch Schmidt Cassegrain telescope valued at $15,000. “This is Pride Under the Stars,” bellows Davis Gay, raising their hand to the heavens. The audience hoots and applauds. “Tonight it’s all about the drag kings,” Gay adds, “because the queens are all home getting their beauty sleep.”
After dusky dance performances that include a newcomer’s drag debut, darkness finally settles over the mountainside. Stars are visible to the naked eye across the westward expanse of the Salish Sea. The president of Sunshine Coast Astronomy Club—officially, a chapter of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada—introduces a documentary film he produced and directed during the COVID-19 pandemic: The Stars Belong to Everyone.
Charles Ennis created the short movie to highlight gender-diverse members of the astronomy and astrophysics communities. A projector flickers and the soundtrack’s electronica trills tunes by J.S. Bach.
“One of the things that strongly influences whether people get into and stay in science is a sense of belonging,” observes Dr. Katie Mack, a cosmologist and assistant professor at North Carolina State University, in one of the film’s first interviews.
When it comes to belonging and identity, tonight’s glittering drag artists are light years from staid science clubs of yore. Even Galileo Galilei—who used his telescope in 1609 to challenge the view that the cosmos is static, Earth-centric clockwork—might wonder at the Sunshine Coast Astronomy Club’s exuberant and iconoclastic forces of attraction.
For the group’s president, Charles Ennis, inspiring new communities with a passion for astronomy is precisely the point. He and his wife Laurel organized the Pride Under the Stars event after meeting local 2SLGBTQAI+ leaders at the Sunshine Coast Pride Festival.
The all-inclusive event was followed by a more concentrated affair for veteran stargazers during the Labour Day weekend. The inaugural Star Party at the observatory required participants to bring their own telescopes and recorders.
“It was a big social event, with all kinds of people with their own gear there, doing astrophotography and sharing that experience,” says Ennis of the four-day gathering. “And we had the aurora show up because the sun is at the maximum of its 11-year cycle right now.”
The astronomy club marks its 20th anniversary this year. The group was formed in 2004 when 16 hobbyists convened in Sandy Hook near Sechelt. The following year, its first Astronomy in the Park event at Porpoise Bay Provincial Park attracted 700 enthusiasts from throughout the Sunshine Coast and across the Lower Mainland. Following a three-year construction project, the observatory opened in 2015.
When weather conditions permit, it opens for the use of the club’s 49 members—and curious visitors. Availability is broadcast via the club’s Facebook group.
Enrichment presentations by scholars are commonplace at centres of the Royal Canadian Astronomical Society. What’s exceptional here is the background and work of visiting researchers like UBC professor Shandin Pete, who is a citizen of the Bitterroot band of the Salish Nation in Montana and Diné from the Beshbihtoh Valley in Arizona.
Dr. Pete—and members of the Sunshine Coast Astronomy Club—are part of a global effort to reconstruct cultural knowledge of traditional stargroupings,known as asterisms.
“Moving here to Vancouver, I started to understand that the stories of our relatives here could add little pieces to the story,” Pete explained, “and that makes it more full and more understandable.”
The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada launched its World Asterism Project in 2021. By interviewing Elders and consulting records of 570 distinct cultures, the group has recorded traditional Indigenous knowledge of over 13,000 star formations. The database now includes 1,602 names for the sun, moon, and planets.
In Salish cosmology, part of the Orion constellation is seen as The Canoe. Pleiades, a star cluster 444 light years from Earth, is known as Cast Away Children. Stars in the Auriga formation, which other cultures called The Charioteer, is known by Salish sky-watchers as the Camas Baking Pit.
“My job is to find the stars and help people put the stories back in the sky,” adds Ennis, who observes that the asterisms project and other outreach have triggered a surge of interest from shíshálh citizens during the past year. “We’re starting to get engagement and a dialogue going back and forth,” he said.
The club’s profile has led to unexpected legacies. In 2015, a mother called after her son received a telescope from the Make-A-Wish Foundation. “Would you teach him how to use it?” asked Tina Heal. The boy, 19-year-old Nairn Robertson, a member of the shíshálh Nation, was living with multiple organ failures. Despite it, he brimmed with enthusiasm for playing the piano, writing poetry—and astronomy.
“When I entered the Robertson home I found that the Make a Wish Foundation had given Nairn a Meade LX90 10" Schmidt Cassegrain with all the accessories: about $4,000 worth of observation gear,” marveled Ennis. The young man rapidly learned to search the skies. He also operated the club’s primary telescope. Every visiting astrophysicist or cosmologist paid a visit to Sechelt Hospital, conversing with Robertson at his bedside.
A few weeks after a transplant operation at the University of Calgary—and Robertson’s 20th birthday—he passed away. Local astronomers attended the family’s memorial service at Camp Elphinstone. They gripped an eagle feather while recounting their youngest member’s fascination with celestial exploration.
The family donated Robertson’s telescope to the Sunshine Coast observatory. Today, it is used by visiting youth. On the anniversary of his death, Robertson’s uncle arranged to have a distant point of light named after him: Nairn’s Star.
For a field as broad as the skies themselves, the Sunshine Coast astronomers have a way of bringing it home.
