New documentary to show centuries before the Greeks, African astronomers named the stars – NorthJersey.com

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Rememberthe constellation Orion?

You know:Thehunter, withthree stars inhisbelt.

Problematic. Not least from a menswear perspectiveit would give Orion a size 60-light-year waist. Somecultures in Africa had a better explanation for this star group.

To them, the three stars representedthree zebras. And the star on Orion's left shoulder, Betelgeuse, was a lion, eyeing them hungrily.

From the earliest times, African cultures showed a keeninterest in the cosmos, saysastronomy educator Gary Swangin, manager of the Panther Academy Planetarium in Paterson.

And by earliest times, read: many centuries before the Greeks.

"Generally, it appears that Africa may be the cradle not only of mankind, but also of astronomical investigation," Swangin said.

In recent months,Swangin has launched a new project to investigate the investigators.

"The African Universe" a projected three-part, $1.8 million documentary he's working on (and still raising money for; he hopes to complete it by the end of 2022) will visit sites in Southern Egypt, Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mali and The Gambia, where remains of ancient calendars, observatories, and sites of astronomical significance can still be found.

"This is a very timely thing," saidMichael Schwartz, a former NASAastronomer and archaeologist who will be assisting on the project. "This is a piece of science that still needs to be done."

"The African Universe" ispart of a larger initiative Swanginlaunched in 2020. Belinda Educational Group for Science and Technology (BEGST), named after his late wife, is meant to encourage interest in the sciences particularly astronomy and astrophysics by students of color.

Another BEGST project is to create an observatory in Arizona, equipped with a 24-inch reflecting telescope, in honor of Ronald Erwin McNair, the AfricanAmerican astronaut who died in the 1986Challenger disaster.

"It's like the slogan Black Lives Matter," Swanginsaid. "Science and technology matter to children of color. And we need to get that message across."

One way to get the word out is to document how astronomy shaped life in Africa, going back many thousands of years.

The three stars in Orion's belt that is to say, the three zebras were important, because they pointed the way to the "digging stars." Seeing this star clusterin the horizon, in the early morning, gave Africans the heads-up that it was time to plant. We in the West know this groupas thePleiades the "seven sisters."

Explanations for the Milky Way varied, culture to culture. Some saw it as a road leading through the forest. Others saw it as sparks from a campfire, lit by some other tribe on the other end of the continent.

"A few of the constellation names seem to be so commonly referenced that we can take them to be authentic terms," saidMike Shanahan,Directorof TheJennifer Chalsty Planetarium, Liberty Science Center, Jersey City.

"The Southern Cross is referred to as a giraffe by theBasotho people (of Southern Africa)," he said. "The Zulu referred to it as the Tree of Life. The Tuareg people in Algeria referred to the Big Dipper as a camel."

But it's not just in mythological terms that Africans understood the stars. They were also early scientists.

In several African nations (there are currently 55), arrangements of stones not unlike Stonehenge, but smaller and older seem to align with prominentstars.

One such arrangement in Zimbabwe, called the Great Enclosure, contains three stones that align with the three "belt" stars in Orion. Not as they are now but as they would have been75,000 to 150,000 years ago, when the wobble or "precession" in the Earth's axis would have changed the entire orientation of the sky.

There may be a similararrangement of stones (its significance is disputed), in South Africa, dubbed "Adam's Calendar."Anotherstone circle atNabta Playa, in Southern Egypt, marks the solstice.

"Other cultures used the stars in meaningful ways," Shanahan said. "It wasn't just the Greco-Roman culture, like we got in school."

It all comes under the heading of "archeoastronomy" a hybrid discipline that looks at the role the starsplayed in past cultures. Schwartz, a former student of Swangin's, originally from Livingston, is a specialist. He has a key behind-the-scenes role in the documentary.

"It will be my job to look at satellite photos of these sties, and measure the length of the shadows on particular days, and say, yes this needs to be investigated, this is definitely a calendar," Schwartz said. "There's every indication that several are."

One unusual piece ofastronomical lore comes from the Dogon people of Mali. There is an oldlegend that fishlike creatures, from the star Sirius, came to Africa some 5,000 years ago.

The aliens explained many useful things.Among them, that a second smaller star, invisible to the naked eye, orbited Sirius.

Preposterous, of course except that Sirius B wasn't discovered by European astronomers until1862.

"How did they know?" Swangin said. "That's the mystery."

Not sucha mystery, say skeptics. The story of the fish-beings was first told to French anthropologists in the 1930s. The Dogoncould have incorporated modern science into their story by then. But those skeptics also have skeptics. They say they've seenthe double-star groupingdepicted in 400-year-old Dogon artifacts.

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Such confusions are natural to a field that isunder-studied, and under-funded. The very notion that ancient Africa could have science was, until fairly recently, dismissed out of hand.

"Europeans are Eurocentric," Schwartz said. "The whole idea, from the European point of view, is that Africans were not capable of such things. It's bias."

Now, that racist attitude is changing. Swangin's documentary project has a two-fold purpose: to educate the general public, and also to promote further study of these ancient artifacts. Part of the aim of the "African Universe" documentary is to put African American researchers to work.

Astronomy and history students from some 50 Historically Black colleges will be engaged, as filmingprogresses, to investigate the old sites, and to work out the mathematics behind those enigmatic stones andlegends. "We'll have astronomy students, Black studies students, behind the scenes doing calculations," Swanginsaid. "It's not just an entertainment film. It'san investigation of these sites."

The popular interest isthere, Swangin says.

He got a sense of it when he gave a planetarium show, three years ago, called "Gospel Music Under the Stars." Eight gospel singers, and a keyboardist, gave a live performanceunder Paterson's planetarium dome, while Swangin recounted African legends, and recalled the importance of the stars to enslaved people who followed the "drinking gourd" (Little Dipper) north to freedom.

"It was standing room only," he said. "It got a really favorable response from a lot of people." It was this show that sparked the idea of an astronomy film that, in particular, might fire the imaginations of African American kids.

"The whole idea is to get students interested in astronomy and space science," he said. "From looking to the past, we hope we can inspire them to look toward the future. We want to inspire African American students to go into that area."

It's a propitious time.Several of today's most high-profile astronomers are African American: among them astrophysicistNeil deGrasse Tyson, andDerrick Pitts, chief astronomer of the Franklin Institute. There are a lot of role models.

It's a propitious time, also,for Swangin. Recently an asteroid was named after him. And the namer was none other than his old student, Michael Schwartz co-discoverer of the tiny body in 2001. "He deserves it," Schwartz said.

Asteroid107396 Swangin, located between Mars and Jupiter, has a 4.19 year orbital period around the sun. It has now been observed by close to 500 people. "It's very odd to think that something in space is named after you," Swangin said. "It's like a little bit of immortality."

Another of his students, then an aid worker in the Middle East, named a planetarium after him in Afghanistan (currently, for obvious reasons, offline). Swangin has been teaching for 50-plus years, first at the Newark Museum Planetarium he was director from 1966 to 1981and starting in 2006, in Paterson.Such honors, from his protgs, make him feel those yearshaven't been wasted.

"It just goes to show I've actually had an influence on people," he said. "It signifies I was appreciated for what I did."

Jim Beckerman is an entertainment and culture reporter for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access tohis insightfulreports about how you spend your leisure time,please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email:beckerman@northjersey.com

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