Throughout the academic year, Swarthmore’s Society of Physics Students (SPS) hosts multiple events, including observatory nights and, more recently, planetarium nights. During the summer, SPS President Angelo Phillipe Valencia ’27 and Visiting Assistant Professor of Astronomy Jesus Rivera found a twenty-year-old, $20,000 inflatable planetarium — never used, hidden under the desks in the astronomy lab . The college’s physics and astronomy labs, which it was supposed to be built for, were too small for the planetarium to be set up.
The planetarium should not be confused with the observatory. Through the observatory, you can see the Swarthmore sky, observe planets, and do astrophotography; through the planetarium, you can project stars without any light pollution.
Valencia explained that light pollution from Philadelphia clouds the sky, making it harder to be seen. A planetarium, which projects the night sky onto a dome, allows viewers to witness celestial scenes anywhere.
Valencia explained that Swarthmore’s planetarium uses projections from light sources and projection cylinders that rotated inside the dome. Initially, it was bought for the physics and astronomy department to demonstrate astronomical events during classes, like how the sky moves over time.
Before deeply exploring constellations, Valencia “only knew about Greek and Roman constellations, like zodiacs, but never about other cultures’ perspectives.” When inspecting the planetarium, he realized the potential for expanding events to include other cultures: “Wait, there’s an Indigenous American constellation.”
Valencia decided to reach out to the Swarthmore Indigenous Student Association (SISA) and the InterCenter’s Indigenous Heritage Month Committee to collaborate and share a new perspective on how we see the sky with the student body. Using the planetarium, an event was created that explored the Navajo constellations.
“With each and every constellation that was projected onto the sky, each and every one of them has their own individual story,” Valencia shared.
In the event, members of SISA told the story of how the constellations and stars are created in the sky from the perspective of the Navajo people. Kaya Fruchtman ’26 shared a story on the coyote star, which Valencia paraphrased for the Phoenix.
“The wolf wanted to lay the stars out so the humans could see the laws in the sky. These stars were on the first lady’s cloth, but the wolf got impatient because the first lady was giving them out individually. So, the coyote threw the cloth towards the endless sky, and that’s how the stars were created.”
Each and every one of us have our own cultures with imaginations and memories, Valencia said. By letting the sky be our canvas, he believes we are able to bring these thoughts to life. Additionally, by learning how other cultures interpret the sky, people can learn more about the cultures.
“What do they say about dynamics? What does that say about hierarchy?” he continued. “Learning about the stars through a cultural lens gains a pretty important insight into how the culture’s dynamic actually is.”
To Valencia, the stars are one of the easiest things to study.
“All you have to do is simply look up,” he said. As one of the oldest disciplines in natural sciences, he has made it his mission to expand SPS, make physics and astronomy more accessible to all communities, and burst the STEM bubble.
Last year, SPS collaborated with ENLACE, the Latine Affinity Group at Swarthmore, and the Black Cultural Center to showcase diversity within STEM. “We shouldn’t just be staying within the realms of just physics and math,” Valencia said.
Looking to the future, he hopes to continue highlighting diversity in the field of physics through more teach-ins and planetarium events.
Regardless of the math or science behind astrophysics, it fulfills him to share new perspectives with people who haven’t seen them before. “When I was leading the planetarium events, it was really nice to see everyone’s faces be in awe, just looking out.”
