388 replies to this topic

[solarity]

I am apart of a local astronomy club. I joined about 20 years ago, then took over a decade break from the club. Coming back to I am in my 40's and there might be one or two new younged people, though for the most part it feels like the whole club is older, some sadly have passed or moved on. I recall meetings and star parties being bigged and our annual big star party had stuff for kids.

I am not sure if people are disconnected from space due to light pollution, while overally connected to their phones or computers. Was it really popular with the moonshot generation and is my generation and younger very boring?

The only area that feels to be gaining interest with younger folks are the seas of refractors covered with red trinkets that have replaced oceans of dobs.

I think cheaper smart telescopes might help get people into the hobby as most astrophotography setups can get costly.

This is purely my observations/opinion, do you guys see the same thing? If so what are we doing wrong and what can we do to get people into it?

[zveck]

The youth in this country are mostly looking for instant gratification. Click = fast answer. Click = take a picture on their phone. Click = kill in a game. Click and waiting 8 hours to collect data to see a picture that they could have click on their phone a better picture in seconds.

[rickmurray1989]

It's not just youth, believe me. I see it in people who are in their 30's and 40's.

 

The youth in this country are mostly looking for instant gratification. Click = fast answer. Click = take a picture on their phone. Click = kill in a game. Click and waiting 8 hours to collect data to see a picture that they could have click on their phone a better picture in seconds.

[starslicer]

People want to see what they see on the internet. I can produce deep sky items like that after 10 hours. And I can produce a planet after taking 100 fps videos and upscaling it.

 

If I show them a deep sky object in the eyepiece it looks like a grey puff at best. If I show them a planet in the eyepiece, its a fraction of the size they see on my astrobin.

 

Smart telescopes will help the casual audience get interested.

 

If they ever make an eyepiece that is sensitive to light and creates an image like we produce with long exposure cameras, there will be a revolution.

[rickmurray1989]

I have seen the same pattern in most technical hobbies, such as amateur radio, programming, high end audio, etc. Fewer and fewer people seem to want to put in the effort to learn and master their crafts anymore. Heck, I have a masters degree with a concentration in information systems, and I still miss card catalogues in libraries.

[TOMDEY]

Sure seems to be a real degenerative trend. Very hard to find youth even interested in math and science anymore. And the thing is --- much like music, languages, history, sports, art --- if you don't develop the skills early in life --- it becomes "too late" to recover them later... the synapses have already gone forever vestigial.

 

Especially rampant in the USA and other ~western~ cultures. The whole population becoming kinda stupid.    Tom

 

ves·tig·i·al
/veˈstij(ē)əl/
adjective
adjective: vestigial
forming a very small remnant of something that was once much larger or more noticeable.
"he felt a vestigial flicker of anger from last night"
Biology
(of an organ or part of the body) degenerate, rudimentary, or atrophied, having become functionless in the course of evolution.
"the vestigial wings of kiwis are entirely hidden" ~

[EGregerson]

all of the above;  in the last 2 years i've been to a couple of 'event's' where i was the only one; there were a couple where there were 2 of us. Skies have just gotten poor.  70 - 80% of events don't even happen.  another aspect is: where can i go when the sky is good?  my balcony is light polluted and limited in view (but not useless!)  can i go to a park? no. they're locked up at dark.  The only way in is if it's a club event.  It's looking more like the road to a dark site is a path to an internet web site on the Atacama.

[archiebald]

Sure seems to be a real degenerative trend. Very hard to find youth even interested in math and science anymore. And the thing is --- much like music, languages, history, sports, art --- if you don't develop the skills early in life --- it becomes "too late" to recover them later... the synapses have already gone forever vestigial.

 

Especially rampant in the USA and other ~western~ cultures. The whole population becoming kinda stupid.    Tom

...which will only be further exacerbated by the rise of AI software.

 

If you want to see the future, watch the movie "Idiocracy".  Slightly dated now (made in 2006) but very relevant to what is happening in the world.
 

[TXLS99]

A lot of younger people dont have the money or the patience.  And dont let any of them fool you by saying that they dont get paid enough or dont have a good enough job to spend money on a hobby like this....  the truth is the spend ALL their money on DoorDash, costing them $25 to have a $10 drink delivered from Starbucks.

[RyanSem]

I was about to write that as a resident "young person" I also don't see much representation from the 20-something crowd. 

 

Then I remembered I'm 30 and probably don't count as a young person anymore!

 

I don't agree that cheaper telescopes (and not "cheap" telescopes, but quality telescopes that are more affordable) get people in the hobby. I see too many threads here and online where people drop good money in a scope with unrealistic expectations of what they're going to see. Most younger people will tend to gravitate towards astrophotography - but then that is a higher barrier of entry. And the outcome is, by all measures, objectively worse than the result if you just Googled it. I don't think that excites many people in general, let those who are younger. 

[SrAstro]

I'm 16, probably a third of the average age of this forum. Few that I know share the same drive for astronomy.

 

I think light pollution is a huge contributor. My classmates were shocked to learn that the Milky way is visible to the naked eye when conditions are correct. Very little really have the attention span/interest to be observing because there was never any drive to when living under city skies.

 

I read books about space a ton in elementary school, so my interest was aroused with that, and it wasn't until relatively recently that I actually got to see what a good sky looks like. I hopped right into the astrophotography bandwagon last year and have enjoyed it a ton, using that same telescope for visual as well.

[unimatrix0]

I don't really have an idea what's up, but even with all these robot telescopes around the interest in the universe we live in is at an all time low.  I mean, we just had an eclipse of the sun and 2 meteors last year, not to mention the aurora all over and everyone just continue to stare at their phones instead. 

[archiebald]

I have a theory.

 

I'm going to be 63 in a couple of weeks....(yikes!)

 

I grew up with the space race with the eventual moon landings. 

 

After the moon there was also the promise (for a while at least) of manned missions to Mars, then there were the Viking landers in the 70's as well as Pioneer 10 being the first mission to Jupiter.  Kids of the late 50's, 60's and 70's were exposed to a huge amount of space and science that was all new and being reported on heavily in the media - plus there was little else to distract us that were interested in it.

 

I for one used to dream of one day living on the moon, then as time went by and reality set in those dreams were dashed, but the love of anything space related was embedded within me, and I suspect many others.  Those kids of that era now translate into the 50, 60 and 70 year olds that seem to make up our major demographic.  After moving around the world and raising a family, I only got into AP a couple of years ago when I could finally start affording decent gear, but the burning desire had been in me for years.

 

As the 70's drew to a close, the space shuttle was just starting operation and humans have been firmly stuck in LEO ever since.  Sure, there have been some interesting missions, but there was little to interest people other than scientists and the media circus had already moved on. 

 

Then by the 80's and 90's kids were  getting into computing, and games not space and astronomy. 

 

Then the internet came along and instant gratification truly arrived along with the evils of social media and people suddenly stopped dreaming of space, instead only dreaming of how many "friends" and followers they could garner.

 

Edit - There is also the case that marriage and birth rates across Asia and the western world have generally been dropping very rapidly for many years - there are going to be less young'uns in all walks of life.  In Japan, my country of residence, the population has dropped by around 3 million over the last 10 years or so.  In one "statistical report", it was calculated there will only be 87 million by 2070 and about 2 or 3 individual people [not millions] after about 200 years.  Extinction by birthrate is already being openly discussed.

Edited by archiebald, 15 January 2025 - 12:02 AM.

[rj144]

I'm not sure what the sea of refractors means though.  That is what most of us use here in this subforum.

[Lukey]

I think it’s the same with my other hobby, birdwatching.

When I was a young twitcher, most of the other birders I’d see around were the same age as me. Now, when I go out birding at my advanced age of 65, they’re STILL the same age as me! No young-uns to take up the baton.

[terry59]

Fortunately, enough of our youth are interested and capable. Of all the branches of the military only the U.S. Space Force is crushing recruiting goals while all the others struggle to fill quotas

[EPinNC]

While I agree with many of the sentiments expressed above, I wonder if the perception that "nobody is interested in astronomy anymore" is partially the result of the self-selected nature of this community.

 

Context is everything.  I became interested in astronomy as a young teenager in the 1970s.  My small city, in a seemingly perpetually cloudy area, was lit up by sodium vapor lamps.  I could barely see anything of the night sky.  But, unlike my friends and most of my family, I happened to be fascinated with all things nature-related, and I dare say I had more patience than others of my cohort.  I had the obligatory cheap 60mm refractor and saw the craters of the Moon, Jupiter and its moons, a tiny Saturn, the smudge of the Andromeda Galaxy, and a bit of the Orion Nebula.  At one point, I borrowed one of my school's 6-inch Newtonian reflectors (a venerable Criterion RV-6, as I recall) and saw the Ring Nebula, a thrill that I never forgot.  I joined the local astronomy club and got to look through a 12.5" Newtonian from a darker sight.  Thrill x 10.

 

However, the club consisted of a very biased sample of the local population -- about a half-dozen men, aged 30-40 and older, with pocket calculators using reverse Polish notation.  It seemed that nobody else had any interest in this stuff, and anybody that was interested was a total nerd.

 

Now here we are, the tiny, concentrated handful of unusually patient people who were ever interested in this stuff to begin with, using this new "internet" thing to find and associate with others like us beyond our local geography.

 

I have set up my telescope at a local park visited by hundreds of people per day, and there is always some fraction of those people who stop to ask what I'm looking at.  When I guide them visually around the sky for even just a few minutes, or let them look through the telescope, or show them processed pictures of what I'm imaging, they are absolutely fascinated and grateful.  Maybe there are more of us nerds out there than we think.

[imtl]

We see the decline in STEM departments at uni level. It's deteriorating and fast. Especially physics and math.

[Chrisofweden]

“Reverse Polish Notation”…. Those were the days!
How I miss them!
Not 😉

/Chris

[TOMDEY]

“Reverse Polish Notation”…. Those were the days!
How I miss them!
Not 😉

/Chris

Yes! I was of course expert at that and also Fortran, etc. And (most importantly) deriving the physics and math "from scratch / first principles" and flow charts, algorithms, encoding, debugging. In those days engineers were expected to follow their projects from beginning to delivery to the end customer every step of the way... even participating in marketing and negotiations. When needed, I made my own buggy whips from reeds... that I personally harvested from the local swamp.    Tom

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[imtl]

Yes! I was of course expert at that and also Fortran, etc. And (most importantly) deriving the physics and math "from scratch / first principles" and flow charts, algorithms, encoding, debugging. In those days engineers were expected to follow their projects from beginning to delivery to the end customer every step of the way... even participating in marketing and negotiations. When needed, I made my own buggy whips from reeds... that I personally harvested from the local swamp. Tom

It's the age of TikTok now

[Chrisofweden]

Yes! I was of course expert at that and also Fortran, etc. And (most importantly) deriving the physics and math "from scratch / first principles" and flow charts, algorithms, encoding, debugging. In those days engineers were expected to follow their projects from beginning to delivery to the end customer every step of the way... even participating in marketing and negotiations. When needed, I made my own buggy whips from reeds... that I personally harvested from the local swamp. Tom

I wonder how many of today’s astrophotographers were once fluent in Assembler and Machine code. I remember when languages such as Fortran were viewed as modern and delusional… 😉

/Chris

[markalot63]

I don't really have an idea what's up, but even with all these robot telescopes around the interest in the universe we live in is at an all time low.  I mean, we just had an eclipse of the sun and 2 meteors last year, not to mention the aurora all over and everyone just continue to stare at their phones instead. 

This is demonstrably not true.    I just wanted to use demonstrably in a sentence.

 

Not directed at you ...

 

The same people looking at their phones were posting Aurora photos, eclipse photos, the long line of traffic in front of me trying to get home from the eclipse, the rise of live Seestar streams on Youtube, etc.  It's not a rosy picture but it's not doom and gloom either.  The same technology that keeps the kids looking at their phones also keeps them informed, so USE it, influence people.  

[DOBguyinGA]

Good morning to everyone,

 

I attended a Catholic high school, and one of the teachers was Brother Joseph. He taught electronics classes, and on weekends he set up his own scope at the school football field after the game, and let people look at the sky. During summers he traveled back to Italy, and worked at the Vatican Observatory.

 

That was quite an introduction. I took an Earth Science class, and again his scope came out.

 

I have been interested ever since.

 

I did not know how to get involved, and money was a problem, so with me now retired I can indulge.

 

I am not sure it is true that younger people just are not interested. About two weeks ago we had a new humidifier installed. The installers were two guys in their late twenties. They saw me reading The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide, and the next thing I knew I was being peppered with questions. Ah, for about 20 minutes. They were really excited by it. I gave them some tips on getting started seeing the sky, and I am sure they followed up. It was a really random experience.

 

My best friend has ordered a Seestar 50. He is 64, and about the last person I would expect to see in this hobby. Based on our conversations he has certainly done his homework to get up to speed. That was another random experience.

 

I do not pretend to understand the reason for the aging of our pleasant obsession. However, I do believe there is more interest than most of us think there is. To me the issue is what to do to cultivate the interest that is out there.

 

I am afraid I do not have a solution to offer. Wish I did.

 

Best regards,

 

DOBguyinGA

[12BH7]

It's a general lack of intellectual curiosity. I blame it on a highly dysfunctional educational system that focuses more on sports than expanding science, art and culture. 

 

I'm expecting a few nasty replies. So why have our standardized testing scopes been dropping for the last 20 years and our universities just pushing kids through.

 

There's an intellectual curiosity when you look at the night sky. We also have it here in the desert. You either understand the struggle of life in it or you don't.