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This Week In History, Library Style! Dec. 30: Galaxies

green and purple galaxy illustration
Photo by David Kopacz on Pexels.com

Libraries are places where we connect people to information that may be useful or interesting to them. Looking at some history, and connecting it to the materials we may have in our libraries, can be a good way to convince patrons to use and enjoy all the things we provide!

This week we are looking at December 30. Of course a lot of things have happened on this date – news and the big stories are the unusual things that are going on around us. One interesting thing that has happened today in 1924: “Astronomer Edwin Hubble announces that the spiral nebula Andromeda is actually a galaxy and that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies in the universe.”

From Wired magazine: “Before Copernicus and Galileo, humans thought our world was the center of creation. Then (except for a few notable stragglers) we learned that the sun and planets did not revolve around the Earth, and we discovered that our sun — though the center of our solar system and vitally important to us — was not the center of the universe or even a major star in our galaxy. But we still grandiosely thought our own dear Milky Way contained all or most of the stars in existence. We were about to be knocked off our egotistical little pedestal once again.”

Bring this historical fact to your library! You can do this with a variety of program and display ideas. We will help you to get started with a few ideas: set up a display of biographies on scientists, examine star maps to find distances between galaxies, cut out stars/planets/shapes and paint them with glow in the dark paint before fixing them to walls or ceilings in the library or the ceiling, take pictures of stars or other things in nature around you, write a story about exploring galaxies and what can be found, write an essay about censorship of ideas and scientific theories, read a series of scifi books about space exploration, draw pictures of the stars or other beings they might find out in a galaxy.

Here are a few books you might add to your collection or share with your patrons – or just enjoy yourself!