This past fall, I taught a 10 week long semester astronomy class for the first time. We met at Longview Park in South Austin and covered all sorts of new topics such as black holes, astrobiology and the search for exoplanets, life without a supernova, stellar evolution, cosmic timescales and stellar distances and so much more!…
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I’ve been getting lot of emails and calls about what telescope to buy your loved one. What I have seen happen is that people usually start looking for something affordable and seemingly easy to use. Most settle on something with a tripod and maybe get fancy and get a ‘go-to’ system that will find the…
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Come to Travis County Milton Reimers Ranch Park Observatory this Sunday for a Total Supermoon Lunar Eclipse. The eclipse will begin at 8:07pm, reach totality at 9:47pm and end at 11:27pm. A supermoon is a new or full moon that happens to coincide with perigee, the closest the moon will be in its monthly orbit around…
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We had clear skies for our first 3-class summer course at Longview park in South Austin. We went on a solar system walk and got a feeling for how BIG our universe really is. We also started to learn how to use our telescopes. Everyone took home some homework: charting the Moon until our last…
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It has been a great turnout for the 3 class summer course in Cedar Park. The last few weeks the students have been charting the moon and taking altitude and azimuth measurements. Tomorrow night we’ll get to share moon calendars and model the moon phases. Saturn is now up near Sagittarius and able to see!…
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It was a beautifully clear night for moon viewing and stargazing last night! Students learned how to use their telescopes and saw Jupiter, the Moon, and Venus. They heard a Japanese tale about the rabbit in the Moon and used a Moon map to find the Tycho crater and ejecta. They also learned how to…
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It was a completely clear night last night for the second Cedars Montessori Elementary astronomy class. We go to know our telescopes and then viewed Jupiter, the crescent Moon, Venus and the Orion nebula. We heard a Navajo star lore story about how the stars and constellations came to be. We finished the night off…
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What a joy it was to be back for the 4th time with the City of Sunset Valley at their public star party last night and what a gorgeous night we had! We focused on Jupiter, the Moon and Venus. We saw two of the 4 Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter. I had the chance to tell some…
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Elementary students from Cedars Montessori met me under the stars and got to know a Dobsonian mount telescope before we headed outside to see Mars in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter and it’s Galilean moons. Even though the clouds started to creep in on us, we still got to see the Orion nebula and of course our…
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Are you curious about the night sky? Do you want to learn how to use a telescope and gain confidence in finding planets, stars and constellations? Join me, Amy Jackson, for night time stargazing and learn about our night sky and how to use a telescope. Each class will incorporate one of the following topics: The Scale…
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