Okay, it was Travers weekend (and what a race!) but I found people who were involved in activities other than horses and drinking. Friday, telescopes popped up all over the grounds at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Planets Night. I dropped by before nightfall and before the music started. A program featuring Debussy, Prokofiev and Holst was planned and the headliner in the sky was Jupiter.

I met a 12-year-old named Tucker Lee from Rock City Falls who had a wonderful thing to say about astronomy as he and his little brother, Lucas, waited for night to fall. Tucker told me his thoughts on the distance between Earth and the stars: “It’s weird how stars show light that’s probably not even there. It’s like looking into the past.”

Planets Night is a new event, designed to use music and the wide-open setting of SPAC to draw people into astronomy. Interns from the Rising Star program at the Dudley Observatory in Schenectady, including Laura Gavlik, an earth science teacher at Shenendehowa. Gavlik said she’s learning astronomy with the goal of teaching it to her students and hosting “star parties,” informal gatherings where friends get together to search the night skies together. Gavlik said she nearly fell off her chair when she saw the rings of Saturn for the first time.

“It’s empowering to realize you can aim the telescope and find objects in the sky,” said Janie Schwab, the executive director of the Dudley Observatory. “Astronomy is more accessible than a lot of the sciences.”