This is gonna take some explaining. I need your help!
I work at a science museum in Nashville, and for the past several years, we’ve put together a big Astronomy Day celebration. Each year, as part of the preparations, I help put together a CD of astronomically-themed music to play for the visitors. (Note: we pay all the appropriate ASCAP and BMI fees. It’s all on the up-and-up.)
We try, when possible, to connect the songs to the theme of the event. For example, a couple years ago we had the SDMB’s own The Bad Astronomer come give a talk about the Apollo Moon “Hoax,” and we had a moon rock on display from NASA. So the Astronomy Day CD for that year had the following track listing, mostly culled from our personal collections:
- Walking on the Moon - The Police
- Lunar Love - The Chromatics
- Destination Moon - They Might Be Giants
- Moon Over Bourbon Street - Sting
- Shepherd Moons - Enya
- A Little Bit of Rock - The Chromatics
- Sister Moon - Sting
- Moon Flight - P.O.N.D.
- Moonlight Spell - Clifford Marshall Van Buren
- Wandering Star - Portishead
- Range and Altitude - from the October Sky soundtrack
- Eye In The Sky - Alan Parsons Project
- Saturn Return - R.E.M.
- Transmitter - Clifford Marshall Van Buren
- Kohoutek - R.E.M.
- Gas Giants - Tears for Fears
- Tripping Over Gravity - Sam Phillips
- Space Walk - P.O.N.D.
- Eclipse - Pink Floyd
Clearly, despite Sting’s best efforts, we ran out of Moon songs pretty quickly. (No, the Moon Song hadn’t hit the Web yet, and no, we wouldn’t have used it anyway 
) We still tried to stick with a vague astronomy/space science theme for the rest of the disc. Some songs were better than others, some familiar, some pretty obscure. The songs aren’t necessarily about space or astronomy, but have titles or lyrics inspired by things cosmic in nature.
This year’s event is coming up on Saturday. Nashville is sister cities with Magdeburg, Germany, which was home to Otto von Guericke, the scientist who performed a famous experiment involving a pair of metal hemispheres, and air pump, and two teams of horses. After pumping out the air between the two hemispheres, the horses couldn’t separate them, due to the force of atmospheric pressure.
Anyway, to make a long story short (too late!) delegates from Germany are visiting here to reenact the experiment, complete with real live draft horses. (more info here)
So…
I need song ideas! Vacuums, pressure, air, atmosphere, horses, - or anything else you can think of that might fit, even tangentially. I’ll probably want to throw in a few comet songs too, since there’s the possiblity of two naked-eye comets in the sky next month.
Preferably these would be songs that are available on iTunes, because I don’t have very long to assemble it. Oh, and they’ve got to be clean enough to play at a museum packed with little kids.
I’ve already got a few candidates, and I’ll post them in a little bit once I remember where I wrote them down!
“Classical Gas” – Mason Williams (instrumental)