I was tickled when Rick Fienberg, then editor of Sky & Telescope magazine, stood up at a special session at the August 2006 meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Prague, grabbed the microphone and proclaimed that every person on Earth should look at the night sky through a telescope in 2009, as Galileo did 400 years earlier. Audacious? Yes! Appropriate? Absolutely! Practical? Well … of course not! But Rick’s enthusiasm soon caught on, and it made good sense. Better sense, I thought, than the mess astronomers got themselves into over the “demotion” of Pluto a few days later.
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As a reader of Science News, you don’t have to be told to go outside some night and look through a telescope at Mars, Saturn or the moon. You probably already have had the pleasure to do so and therefore accept that there is no better way to enhance science awareness than to engage in the direct observation of nature and all the wonderfully wild things in it.