Noah Johnson Daily Press Dan Young, of the Delta Astronomy Society (DAS) speaks to attendees about Saturn during his presentation at the Bay Sages meeting on Thursday. He said he first saw Saturn through a reflecting telescope when he was 11 years old, and it became his favorite planet.

ESCANABA — The Bay Sages heard from the Delta Astronomical Society (DAS) during its monthly meeting on Thursday.

DAS Newsletter Editor and Public Communications Coordinator Dan Young presented a Journey Through Space and Time; a Guided Tour of the Solar System and Beyond.

“We begin with the sun, our day star. A ball of gas that converts 680 million tons of hydrogen into helium at its 27 million-degree core every second of every day of every year for 4.6 billion years. It’s been doing this, and it will continue to do it for another 5 billion years if physicists are correct,” Young said.

Young used the Planet Walk project as a visual aid and scale to understand the distances between the sun and other planets.

“The distances that you walk on the walk between the different posts with the placards are accurate to the same scale. So each foot that you walk is 865,000 miles,” he explained.

43 feet away from the sun using the planet walk scale, or 37,195,000 miles away, is Mercury. The planet is the closest to the sun and is the fastest planet in our solar system.

“It just flies around the sun so fast that our ancient ancestors saw it as the messenger of the gods. They would see it, and then it would disappear behind the sun,” he said.

Venus, described as Earth’s ‘near twin, would be almost exactly identical to Earth if it wasn’t so close to the sun. Young explained Venus is 27 percent closer to the sun than Earth, making it what Young called the ‘solar system’s version of hell.’

“It has sulfuric acid rain; it has surface temperatures of 864° Fahrenheit. The only people ever to land anything on Venus and make it and survive (machines, not people) long enough to transmit anything were the Russians. They tried seven times. They had two that got down there and were able to survive long enough to send back two or three pictures,” Young explained.

The next stop is Earth, where 71 percent of the planet is covered with water.

Young said life has thrived on Earth for 75 percent of its 4.56 billion-year history, the only place known to have life.

Young then guided guests to Mars, the landing place of more spacecrafts than any other solar system object.

The United States currently has two SUV-sized rovers exploring Mars’ surface, with the first landing in 2012.

“Each of them (are) looking for different kinds of signs in different places that Mars could or maybe or once did harbor life as we know it,” Young said.

To get to the next planet, Young brought guests through the asteroid belt, a 10-million-mile-wide band of broken bits of rocky matter.

After the belt, the next stop is the ‘king of planets,’ Jupiter.

“Jupiter has the most of everything. It has the most mass. It’s the most colorful,” he said.

Next up is Saturn, Young’s favorite planet.

Young shared that Saturn has 274 moons, the most by far of any planet. The planet’s iconic ring wraps around roughly 175,000 miles from end to end but is only a mere 30 feet thick.

Next up is Uranus, a planet Young described as a giant ball of frozen gas, followed by Neptune, the last major planet.

Neptune is described as an ‘ice giant,’ as it is five times larger than Earth and far from the sun in the darkness.

Young concluded the journey with the Pluto-Charon system, two small, brown orbs that slowly circle each other on a tilted, elongated orbit.

He also spoke about the history of DAS and the planet walk on Ludington Street.

DAS started in 1985 with about 20 members; Young joined the group in 1991.

His love for astronomy began when he was just 11 years old when his brother got a reflecting telescope for Christmas.

“I looked in the eyepiece, and it was Saturn, and I was hooked. Saturn is still my favorite thing to look at in the night sky,” Young said.

He spoke about what DAS does in and for the community, including school presentations

for students, Boy Scouts, and Cubs Scouts.

“We also handle the inflatable planetarium dome and demonstrate the night skies; I just did one of those with the Cub Scouts out in Bark River about a month ago. We have public observing sessions such as the 2017 and 2024 solar eclipses, usually down in the Ludington Park in Escanaba,” Young said.

Other notable events include observing sessions of the March 1996 comet Hyakutake and the April 1997 comet Hale-Bopp, one of the brightest comets of the 20th century.

He talked about the Planet Walk, initially installed in 2002. As scientific theories are constantly updated as new information emerges, the Planet Walk required an update, which DAS completed in the summer of 2024.

“We installed new plaques complete in color with QR codes… which have links to National Geographic video clips on each of the planets and the sun, the planets, the asteroids all the way out to the voyager,” Young said.

The Voyager 1 and 2 are spacecrafts launched in 1977 to study the solar system and space, and they still remain in orbit, sending data back to Earth.

“Their little radioisotopic generators are still powering them 48 years later, and they’re out in the depths of interstellar space,” Young said.

He noted that sending two spacecrafts was a precaution if one was destroyed, but both remain operable and intact.

Young said scientists were concerned about the Voyager crashing into something, particularly when traveling through an asteroid field.

“We weren’t sure we could get between these things, but you know what we know now? The average distance between asteroids is over 600,000 miles,” he said.

“You’d have to work at it to hit something, but we didn’t know that.”

To learn more about DAS, visit its Facebook page at Delta Astronomical Society, DAS.