Weather Sends UW-Milwaukee Planetarium Stargazers Inside

Participants showed up hoping for a glimpse of the night sky. However, the UW-Milwaukee Stargaze event moved into the Planetarium Feb. 9 because of the cloud cover. It turns out all but one of this year’s Stargaze events, at least by the February event, had to move inside.

This year’s eighth Stargaze event was moved into the planetarium due to rain on Wednesday March 23. Stargaze is an ongoing free event at the Manfred Olson Planetarium. It usually takes place on the roof of the UWM physics building; students are able to view the night sky through telescopes.

“When it’s raining we can’t really do much about that,” UWM freshman Derek Palecek said. “We move in here so we can still do stargazing and give people a chance to come and ask any space-related questions they may have or just to enjoy their time here.”

Although the program is only 30 minutes, Stargaze usually lasts up to an hour because the staff are more than happy to repeat the show for latecomers.

“We personally like it a lot when people come and just chat with us about space because this is the staff’s opportunity to do shows,” Palecek said. The staff uses the program Stellarium to project a real time feed of the night sky on the planetarium dome. Palecek talked about the constellations and how to find them. He also showed a variety of videos about space during the presentation.

The program offers extra credit for astronomy students regardless of bad weather. Junior Derek White said getting the extra credit wasn’t hard.

“I just filled out the handout that they had,” White said. “It was easy, and they covered all the topics on it. I would recommend it definitely.”

Stargaze isn’t just for astronomy students.

“We welcome the entire community. Young, old, anyone,” staff member Jamie Kelling said.

“Being a free event, it’s sort of like a community outreach,” Derek Jaschob, another staff member, added. “We want to try and bring in more people regularly and expose then to the science and astronomy.”

Students are encouraged to attend even if they’re not receiving extra credit for an astronomy class.

“I’m very interested in astronomy and the night sky and I thought it would be a good place to learn about it,” freshman Matthew Mattioli said. “It was good, not as good as being outside, but you can’t do anything about the weather unfortunately. I would definitely tell my friends to come take a look.”

When the weather is good, students have access to two to three different telescopes on the roof, some of which are very high-tech.

“The cool part about it is it can track the sky,” Kelling said. So as you’re looking at a planet, the planet’s going to be moving, the earth’s going to be moving, but this will keep it all aligned for you.” The telescope also has the ability to find the planets and constellations.

“The other telescope we generally use is an Astroscan,” Kelling said. “We let people just move it around themselves. You want to explore on your own? You can just play around with that one.”

There are only six more chances to go stargazing this semester: April 6 and April 20 as well as the Blitz Week which is four days of stargazing in a row, May 2 though May 5.

“We do one of those at the begging of the semester and one at the end just to give students who are in the astronomy classes a chance to get extra credit and for anyone who just loves coming out,” Palecek said. “Hopefully we’ll get one or two days outside during those blitzes.”

Students are also encouraged to check out the Friday shows, which are a little more formal.

“This week is the start of our A Night Under the Caribbean Sky, which is going to be a really special show because for many of the days we’re bringing in live music to accompany the show,” Palecek said. “We’re going to be learning about all the different cultures of the Caribbean and what they see in the night sky.”

A Night Under the Caribbean Sky is collaboration between the UWM planetarium and the center for Latin American and Caribbean studies. The show will run from 7pm until 7:55 p.m. Friday nights in the planetarium March 25 to May 6. The cost is $3 to attend