Clouds took over most of the Friday night sky, but that didn’t stop ASU’s monthly Astronomy Open House from attracting stargazers.Besides using telescopes, community members looked at meteorite and rock samples, poster displays and listened to a talk on volcanoes on Earth and other planets.
Anyone can come to the open house, which is held the last Friday of every month during the semester on the fifth floor and roof of the George M. Bateman Physical Sciences Center H Wing.
The coordinator is Teresa Ashcraft, an astrophysics doctoral candidate.
“The Astronomy Open House is basically a public outreach opportunity,” Ashcraft said. “We try to get families to come because we want to educate the young people and try to bring them in.”
Different sights in the sky depend on the time of year, light pollution and the weather, Ashcraft said.
“If we could have a nice dark area to hold this, then it would be way cooler because you could see a lot more stuff,” she said.
There are more interesting stars and nebulae to see during the spring, though the visibility of planets varies, Ashcraft said.
Right now, Mars is more apparent but Saturn will become clearer later in the month.
Though clouds limit stargazing opportunities, the space offers other activities, like hearing a lecture from a different graduate or undergraduate student each time on topics related to space and geology.
Ashcraft said she hopes to vary the activity options in the future.
Leon Manfredi, an earth and space exploration senior, spoke to Friday’s audience about volcanoes in the solar system, including those on Earth, Mars and Venus.
“Venus is covered in thousands of volcanoes,” said Manfredi, an intern for the ASU/NASA Space Grant program. “I love volcanoes, especially Martian volcanoes.”
Manfredi will be studying explosive eruptions on Mars in graduate school at ASU, which he applied to for the fall semester.
“I had no idea what I wanted to specialize in until I took my volcanology class,” Manfredi said.
Lev Spivak-Birndorf, a geological sciences doctoral candidate, helped display meteorites from the Center for Meteorite Studies at the open house.
“[The meteorites] formed before the Earth formed in a time when the Solar System was very different than it is now,” Spivak-Birndorf said. “They tell us something about very early times in the Solar System.”
Anyone can see the meteorites on display in the Bateman Physical Sciences Center C-Wing.
“We get free samples sent to us from the cosmos,” Spivak-Birndorf said jokingly.
A lot of aspects of meteorites can be studied, like determining their age, he said.
“We study the chemistry of meteorites and try and trace them, place them with their sources and just understand how they relate to one another,” he said.
The center has the world’s largest university-based meteorite collection, according to its Web site.
Matthew Mosher, an intermedia art graduate student, attended the open house for the second time for access to telescopes.
“I think it’s a really good opportunity to use this kind of equipment,” said Mosher, who is interested in cosmology. “My personal art practice is also about the fundamental search for maybe not scientific truth, but for truth of some kind.”
Reach the reporter at reweaver@asu.edu
