Published by the Point Reyes Light with photo by David Briggs
Do you have an image of the night sky in your mind’s eye? Do you think about the winter solstice as the beginning of winter, or the middle? Is Mercury retrograde a literal backward transit, or a matter of perception? These are some of the inquiries that Don Jolley, the longtime seventh- and eighth-grade teacher at the Bolinas School, will explore in his new yearlong course for adults called “Mapping the Night.”
Meeting after dark once a month, Mr. Jolley will show participants how to record their naked-eye observations with nothing but a compass and a straightedge, and to ultimately create a detailed map called an “astrolabe.” Once completed, the map can be used to predict the celestial movements in the Northern Hemisphere.
Astrolabes, Mr. Jolley said, were like the “personal computer of the Middle Ages,” largely abandoned as people depended more on calendars, clocks and phones. Two decades ago, he downloaded one off the internet and deconstructed it piece by piece in order to learn how to make it.
Mr. Jolley, who studied art in college but now teaches a variety of subjects, including science and math, has created such a map every year since that time—a practice he shares with his students. After watching them receive this unique education, parents and friends urged Mr. Jolley to broaden his offering.
The new course is a program presented by the Bolinas Museum, where one of his astrolabes is on display through December. It will touch on astrology, geometry, mythology and a host of other integral subjects. It is his hope that participants will use the information creatively in their own lives, whether for art or math or some other purpose. The project will culminate in a museum exhibition of the completed astrolabes in January 2020.
Since the sky is only changing about half a degree per lifetime, Mr. Jolley says that years of observation of the same movements now appear to him as “mechanical clockwork.”
But he also describes a larger shift. “After drawing the sky, even over the course of sixth months, your perspective starts to change,” he said. “It allows you to leave Earth, to see everything differently, to see the sky not as something that is moving but to realize that actually, it is our vantage point that is changing. How many of us have the sense of moving?”
Mr. Jolley said he does feel that movement—the lean of the earth’s axis, the Northern Hemisphere moving away from the sun, the rotational pull of the planet.
“It’s a way of us getting out of here,” he said, gesturing at his feet planted on his classroom floor, “and looking back on it all.”