Attend a Star Party

star-party-astronomy

Quick Win

Gazing at the night sky can be both calming and rejuvenating — especially when you share the experience with others.

Try this today

• Search for clubs, planetariums and observatories near you at skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-clubs-organizations/.
• NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory maintains a list of events at nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/clubs-and-events.cfm. You can search to find events and clubs near you.
• Enjoy learning more about the stars in a community-focused, relaxing, enchanting environment.

Why

Star parties, held by members of the amateur astronomy community, offer the chance to see planets, constellations, deep-sky objects and the moon in a community-oriented environment. The vastness of the night sky can help shift your perspective and fill you with a sense of awe, which may have beneficial effects on mental health, according to a review paper from 2021 in Frontiers in Psychology. A study comprising just over 1,000 university students in six experiments had participants experience awe through watching videos, writing about awe or enjoying a vast landscape, along with control group participants who instead addressed positive emotions such as joy, amusement or pride. Before and after, all participants were asked to describe a daily stressor in their lives. Afterward, a far larger number of participants who were exposed to ideas of awe in each experiment said their daily hassles seemed far less important. Awe seems to shift people’s self-appraisal, introducing “a sense of vastness” and “an awareness of a large force or entity to which the self is connected,” write the researchers. The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2021.