“Night Skies of Aboriginal Australia”

Bays Mountain Planetarium is excited to host Paul Curnow for this single, special, live evening presentation. Paul is an astronomy lecturer at the Adelaide Planetarium in South Australia and an expert on the Australian Aboriginal night sky. Tickets must be purchased in advance for this limited engagement.

About the presentation:

Aboriginal Australians have been looking at the night sky for tens of thousands of years. This connection with the night sky represents some of the earliest ponderings about the cosmos and was an effort to explain natural phenomena. Moreover, the stars were used for navigation, education, as a seasonal guide to the availability of foods, in addition to reinforcing cultural identity and spirituality. Paul ‘Starman’ Curnow, astronomy lecturer at the Adelaide Planetarium in South Australia will talk about some of the Aboriginal Dreaming stories; their ‘dark pattern’ shapes, such as the ‘celestial emu;’ the names they gave to the stars and the differences between the way the sky is viewed in comparison to the classical 88-constellations used by contemporary astronomers.

A bit about Paul:

After 31-years, Paul Curnow [B.Ed] is South Australia’s longest serving planetarium lecturer. He has been a member of the Field Geology Club of South Australia since 1992. In 2002, he served as a southern sky specialist for visiting U.S. and British astronomers who were in Australia for the total solar eclipse. After three decades of research, he is regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on Australian Aboriginal night sky knowledge; and in 2004, he worked in conjunction with the Lake Erie Nature and Science Center Planetarium in Ohio, on the creation of a show that features Indigenous Australian stories of the night sky. Moreover, from 2018-2022, he has served as a consultant on Indigenous Astronomy for the Australian Space Agency. In addition, Paul runs several popular courses for the public that focus on the constellations, planetary astronomy, meteoritics, historical astronomy and ethnoastronomy, which primarily deals with how the night sky is seen by non-western cultures. He appeared as the keynote speaker at the inaugural 2010 Lake Tyrrell Star Party in Sea Lake, Victoria and in 2011 was a special guest speaker at the Carter Observatory in Wellington, New Zealand. Since 2012 Paul has taken the role of Lecturer for the ‘Astronomy & the Universe’ course (EDUC2066); and between 2019-2021 for ‘Science’ (EDUC 2030) for the School of Education at the University of South Australia. Moreover, since 2021 he has been a member of the Andy Thomas Space Foundation Education Advisory Committee. Paul appears regularly in the media and has authored over 50 articles on astronomy.

On this trip to the US, Paul is making his way across the country and providing presentations like this at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, CA and the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ. Bays Mountain is his next main venue.

This is a special presentation through the Bays Mountain Park Association. Tickets are $15 per person. Children 12 and under are $10 each. Due to the limited engagement, no other discounts apply.