As the NFL season gets into gear (Go Bills!) it’s time to mention football’s deep connections with astronomy.
The 1927 Broadway musical Good News, which gave us the popular song “The Moon Belongs To Everyone”, is about the division in college life between sports and astronomy, as the male lead of the play tries to skip out on astronomy class to help the school team win the football game.
The area of a football field is often used as an astronomical scale, to point out that the International Space Station is about 1.3 yards shorter than the length of an American football field, or to use various kinds of fresh fruit to simulate the size of the Solar System (not to scale.)
One of my favorite asterisms that isn’t included in the Starry Night gallery for SciDome planetariums so far is the Winter Football. There is a Winter Triangle asterism that is drawn between the bright winter stars Betelgeuse, and Sirius and Procyon, but the Winter Football is much better. If you can imagine a shape drawn between Sirius, Procyon, Pollux, Castor, Capella, Aldebaran and Rigel, it looks roughly football-shaped. For the full conversion, the stars that make up Orion’s Belt can be the stitching. The open-source nature of Starry Night allows the user to create new asterisms like this.
To illustrate the Winter Football on SciDome, download this zipped folder with three files: Winter Football.txt is a short code file that describes the lines drawn between these stars, and the label of the asterism. This file was built using the same template used by Dr. Bradstreet in his Spitz Institute lesson about building custom asterisms.
The second file is a .PNG slide of a cartoon football with a transparent background. For extra verisimilitude, after the stick figure of the football is highlighted on the sky, ATM-4 can be used to bring up the details of the football itself.
The third file is an image with the Winter Football asterism highlighted, showing the sky as it will appear during Super Bowl LII on the 1st Sunday in February of next year.
To use this file in an updated Starry Night Dome 7 for SciDome, it should be added to the folder location:
C:\ProgramData\Simulation Curriculum\Starry Night Prefs\Sky Data\Asterisms\Winter Football.txt
In older SciDomes it may be necessary to load it onto folders on Preflight and Renderbox computers in two separate steps. Please contact me at Spitz Support for details.
The football slide can be used from an appropriately named subfolder of your Preflight desktop shortcut Slides folder. It should work well in semitransparent mode.
All of these uses of getting sports fans interested in astronomy carry no risk of personal injury.