Finding Hope in Sidewalk Astronomy, from a Neighborhood Near You to a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Mount Pleasant Aurora Startrail
Photo by Gael Gomez
Star Trek called it the “final frontier.” When Jodie Foster’s character in Contact witnessed it, all she could say was, “They should’ve sent a poet.” And in the 1960s, we raced with rockets and dreams to be the first to reach it. Space has always been a symbol of possibility, mystery, transcendence, and hope.
For Gael Gomez and Guy Brandenburg of the National Capital Astronomers, it became much more than that; it became a bridge across generations and between neighbors on the sidewalk. For almost the entirety of human existence, space has been a faraway symbol of hope, but through taking over street corners, and during the 2025 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, they’ve brought that hope right here into Washington, D.C., into a neighborhood near you.
The odd-couple friendship between Gomez and “Mr. Brandenburg,” as he’s known, began in the basement of the Chevy Chase Community Center. There, a flyer for a telescope-making workshop caught Gomez’s eye. Growing up in rural Venezuela, Gomez spent countless nights gazing at the night sky during power outages, feeling the pull of the cosmos.
“It’s almost a spiritual feeling of awe,” he says. “Looking up at the night skies, nothing comes quite close to it.”
In 2021, he was able to see the stars once again by going to Mr. Brandenburg’s telescope-making workshops twice a week. Mr. Brandenburg picked up on Gomez’s genuine interest, answering all his questions and helping him learn all things telescope making and astronomy. For Mr. Brandenburg, there seems to be a real sense of pride in how he’s been able to help Gomez become a more efficient “tinkerer”—skills that reach beyond their sidewalk hobby.
“Let’s say you stop doing any astronomy,” Mr. Brandenburg posed to Gomez during our interview. “It’s always useful, right? You become a homeowner, there’s a million things that need to be tinkered and fixed. It’s a good skill to have.”
As Gomez’s skills grew, so did his desire to share the spiritual feeling he felt looking skyward as a child. With the National Capital Astronomers, he leads the charge in organizing viewings for the public—on street corners, at festivals, and directly into the eyes of people who may have never seen Saturn’s rings or the sun’s fiery flares. The hydrogen alpha telescope, in particular, allows viewers to see the sun in real-time, its orange surface glowing and alive. It puts our lives into perspective—seeing the raw power of the star that sustains us and realizing how fragile life is and how lucky we are to be alive.
Gomez writes: “The North America Nebula is an emission nebula 2,590 light years away from Earth. It is located in the constellation of Cygnus and is 90 light years across. It is visible from very dark skies as a large but very, very faint diffuse nebulosity. It consists mostly of hydrogen, like most star-forming emission nebulae. For this photograph, I went to a private observatory near Haymarket, Virginia.”
Upon visiting space, Star Trek’s Captain Kirk said, “My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration. Instead, it felt like a funeral.” While Gomez and Mr. Brandenburg have never visited space, they share similar sentiments about what it means to be hopeful about a galaxy far, far away, and what we can do at home on the ground. This conclusion took Captain Kirk ninety years and a trip to space to realize, but Gomez only eighteen years and a homemade telescope.
“The more you educate people on space, the more people realize there’s nothing to look towards,” he says. “All of our hope is here on Earth. So, take care of our planet. Appreciate just how ridiculous it is that we are here, and we are alive.”
Mr. Brandenburg acknowledges our human existence as a “one-time accident.” He asks us to consider that space is a really dangerous place, whereas, right here on Earth, we have a “beautiful planet with green vegetation and the oceans and rivers and rain and incredible atmosphere and plants.”
John F. Kennedy famously said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” Maybe choosing the moon was the best course of action in the 1960s. But today, perhaps we must find hope in the other things—like spending time educating the public through sidewalk astronomy. This act of gathering and observing reminds us that we are, against all odds, here together on a planet teeming with life, and it is our duty to steward it and each other.
Gael Gomez’s photographs will be featured in Second Sunset: The Art of DIY Telescopes, Sidewalk Astronomy & Astro Photography, presented by Lost Origins Outside, an outdoor public exhibition space located at 3243 Mt. Pleasant St. NW, Washington, D.C., September 12–November 9, 2025. The show includes images of space taken from the sidewalks of Mt. Pleasant, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and other sites in the D.C. region.
Melia Person was a program intern at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, working with lowrider and sidewalk astronomy programming, and a senior at Santa Monica College in California, majoring in art history.
