Email contact@standleylakestargazing.com to join our weekly newsletter or simply use this link to join our weekly program
The James Webb Space Telescope is one of the most significant tools astronomers have at their disposal. Operating an observatory of this complexity requires an elaborate infrastructure to provide reliable data to scientists, and it’s more challenging than you might expect. Join Standley Lake Stargazing this week for a behind-the-scenes look at the unique operational considerations and engineering of the JWST!
Ryland Grace finds himself faced with a daunting challenge: to save humanity on his interstellar journey as the sole survivor aboard the Hail Mary! Sound outlandish? Let’s find out! Join Standley Lake Stargazing this week for a look at the hard science and engineering portrayed in the film. Spoilers ahead! Watch the film in advance for the full story, we’ll take a look at selected scenes.
Join us for a watch party hosted by Majestic View Nature Center in conjunction with the Standley Lake Public Library and Standley Lake Stargazing, we’ll have crafts, snacks, and of course several telescopes set up to view some summertime deep-sky objects in between meteors. Feel free to bring a chair or a blanket!
Ryland Grace finds himself faced with a daunting challenge: to save humanity on his interstellar journey as the sole survivor aboard the Hail Mary! Sound outlandish? Let’s find out! Join Standley Lake Stargazing this week for a look at the hard science and engineering portrayed in the film. Spoilers ahead! Watch the film in advance for the full story, we’ll take a look at selected scenes.
Ryland Grace finds himself faced with a daunting challenge: to save humanity on his interstellar journey as the sole survivor aboard the Hail Mary! Sound outlandish? Let’s find out! Join Standley Lake Stargazing this week for a look at the hard science and engineering portrayed in the film. Spoilers ahead! Watch the film in advance for the full story, we’ll take a look at selected scenes.
Hosted by Ron Havermann and Aric Vyhmeister
Reminder: Our Thursday evening programs continue throughout the year. Send an email to contact@standleylakestargazing.com if you’d like to join the mailing list and receive notifications about our weekly programs.
Join this virtual-only program via Zoom, launch the meeting with this link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/98762823840?pwd=NWJ0Y3FMTnVZRGRxMmRZcHRkU2V5dz09
Hosted by Standley Lake Stargazing
Send questions to Contact@StandleyLakeStargazing.com
Learn more at www.StandleyLakeStargazing.com/programs
You’ve heard of black holes, but when it comes to cosmic heavyweights there’s a close contender for the most fierce object that nature can produce: the neutron star. A neutron star answers the question of how closely atoms can be packed together, and the results are staggering. Join Standley Lake Stargazing this week for Part 2 of an in-depth look at these extreme objects and how we’ve come to understand them, the extraordinary means by which we detected them, and how they fit into our understanding of the larger cosmos!
The Roman Space Telescope is prepping for launch, Hercules and his famous globular cluster are entering the evening sky, and the atmosphere is filled with pollutants that impact observing in sometimes unexpected ways. Join Standley Lake Stargazing this week for a roundup of these and other topical matters for skywatchers!
Our Milky Way affords observers a magnificent and unique perspective that can’t be seen in any other galaxy in the night sky. From deep within a spiral arm of our home galaxy, we can directly observe structures and dense regions of stellar formation that aren’t clearly visible to us in distant galaxies, and a plethora are within reach of small telescopes and even the naked eye! Join Standley Lake Stargazing this week for more Milky Way observing tips and a look at the science behind the sights.
Summer is upon us, and that means warm nights with the spectacular glow of the Milky Way arching overhead with otherworldly dust lanes cast against seas of stars! Join Standley Lake Stargazing this week for a deeper look at the Milky Way that wraps around the sky, including observing tips to help you navigate the nearly endless stream of summer gems buried in this region of the sky.
The lunar regolith poses enormous problems for engineers and is unexpectedly difficult to manage, leading to a host of novel mitigation approaches that will eventually be used on future moon missions. Join Standley Lake Stargazing this week for an in-depth look at NASA’s modern experimental solutions and cutting-edge regolith research.
This week we’ll gather headlines from the expansive world of astronomy and spaceflight. What has the Webb been up to? Are lithium-fed thrusters over the horizon or a sci-fi fantasy? How are astronomers monitoring the Sun in real-time? Join Standley Lake Stargazing for these and a slew of other topical headlines. See something interesting that you’d like to discuss? Send us a note and we’ll take a look!
Hosted by Ron Havermann and Aric Vyhmeister
Reminder: Our Thursday evening programs continue throughout the year. Send an email to contact@standleylakestargazing.com if you’d like to join the mailing list and receive notifications about our weekly programs.
Join this virtual-only program via Zoom, launch the meeting with this link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/98762823840?pwd=NWJ0Y3FMTnVZRGRxMmRZcHRkU2V5dz09
Hosted by Standley Lake Stargazing
Send questions to Contact@StandleyLakeStargazing.com
Learn more at www.StandleyLakeStargazing.com/programs
With all the hype surrounding the possibility of a manned trip to Mars in our lifetime, it’s easy to overlook some of the less glamorous engineering challenges that a Mars mission will face. Join Standley Lake Stargazing this week as we explore the challenges of propulsion, life support in a closed system, communication, and crew resource management in long-duration spaceflight!
Probing further into the topic of supernovas, we’ll continue looking at ways the elements were cooked and distributed across the span of galaxies, leading to the formation of new stars and entire solar systems. Join Standley Lake Stargazing for a deeper look into the explosive subject of supernovas!
We’ve all heard about supernovas - the massive release of energy at the end of a star’s life - but that’s just the beginning! When a star dies it distributes heavy elements that eventually form new stars, planets, and the critical building blocks of life. Join Standley Lake Stargazing to for a look at the incredible phenomena of supernovas and how, as Carl Sagan put it, “we are made of star-stuff”.
Hosted by Ron Havermann and Aric Vyhmeister
Reminder: Our Thursday evening programs continue throughout the year. Send an email to contact@standleylakestargazing.com if you’d like to join the mailing list and receive notifications about our weekly programs.
Join this virtual-only program via Zoom, launch the meeting with this link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/98762823840?pwd=NWJ0Y3FMTnVZRGRxMmRZcHRkU2V5dz09
Hosted by Standley Lake Stargazing
Send questions to Contact@StandleyLakeStargazing.com
Learn more at www.StandleyLakeStargazing.com/programs
Warmer nights, a new season of constellations, and a plethora of spaceflight activity offer something for space enthusiasts of all stripes. Join Standley Lake Stargazing for a guide to spring night-sky observing, new imaging equipment aimed at beginners, and recent missions that might have been overshadowed by the iconic Artemis II mission!
With the safe and successful return of Artemis II NASA has been treating us to a goldmine of never-before-seen footage from the mission including up-close engineering footage of the launch, and a host of post-flight analysis including an inspection of the delicate heatshield. Join Standley Lake Stargazing this week for a thorough debrief of the Artemis II mission!
Humans have always looked to the night sky in an effort to understand our place in the universe. For much of history, the search for life beyond Earth was largely philosophical. But it transformed into a modern, systematic scientific pursuit with the rise of radio astronomy and space exploration in the mid-20th century. Since then, this search has evolved into a deeply interdisciplinary effort, combining modeling and data analysis across planetary science, chemistry, biology, and astronomy, and now drives many of today’s NASA mission priorities from exploring diverse worlds within our solar system to studying distant exoplanets.
Astronomers probe the depths of the universe like cosmic archaeologists, looking for clues from the earliest periods of the universe to reconstruct the conditions of its origins and inform hypotheses about its eventual fate. Join Standley Lake Stargazing as we continue looking at the observations that led to our understanding of the Big Bang and explore the strange reality that followed!
The fantastic process that birthed the universe poses some incredible questions for scientists to ponder. Exactly what is the universe pushing into? Will it collapse back on itself one day? What is the shape of the void, and does it have edges? Join Standley Lake Stargazing this week for a continuing look at the Big Bang and the peculiar characteristics of the universe. We’ll examine the framing of these questions and discuss current scientific models, even though many of these questions raise more questions than answers!
Hosted by Ron Havermann and Aric Vyhmeister
Reminder: Our Thursday evening programs continue throughout the year. Send an email to contact@standleylakestargazing.com if you’d like to join the mailing list and receive notifications about our weekly programs.
Join this virtual-only program via Zoom, launch the meeting with this link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/98762823840?pwd=NWJ0Y3FMTnVZRGRxMmRZcHRkU2V5dz09
Hosted by Standley Lake Stargazing
Send questions to Contact@StandleyLakeStargazing.com
Learn more at www.StandleyLakeStargazing.com/programs
Where is the center of the universe? Is there an edge at the boundary of space-time? Why is the visible universe still stretching and how do we know? Join Standley Lake Stargazing this week for a closer look at the modern understanding of these and other counterintuitive properties of our universe!
With countless outlets offering information, it can be a bit daunting to pin down high-quality sources for various astronomy topics. Join Standley Lake Stargazing this week for a roundup of vetted resources for astronomy news, visual observing, spaceflight updates, and much more, while touching on a few topical headlines along the way.
