Starry Nights @ SFU

Welcome to Starry Nights @ SFU!

We host free evening star parties and other events, open to the public, and
free daytime telescope & astronomy workshops for grade-school age kids!

Join our mailing list! Email starry-nights-request@sfu.ca subject: subscribe.

Recent Happenings!

The 2012 SFU astronomy season got off to a big start, with the fourth annual SFU student astronomy club "Geek Week Festival of Astronomy", which took place in the evening of Friday January 27. The club hosted over 250 guests, mostly families with young kids, and served 350 slices of pizza at $1/each! Kids got to run around all four corridors of the Academic Quadrangle following clues along the Solar System Scavenger Hunt! We also heard two great talks, by Bill Burnyeat, who runs the BCIT planetarium and is RASC Vancouver's own "Mr. Astronomy"; and Eric Dunn,a veteran astronomer, educator, writer, host and producer. A blog on the festival is coming soon!

A 2011 year-end star party took place on Friday December 2 with about 75 guests in attendance, despite the clouds that rolled in at sunset, and we had a half-dozen telescopes on hand. Thankfully, some holes in the clouds allowed most of our guests to view the Moon, Jupiter and a few of its Galilean moons, and even a couple of deep sky objects! Check out my blog on the star party, which includes a movie that I shot "in the field"!

A 2011 year-end telescope workshop for young families took place on the evening of Saturday December 10, the week after our year-end star party, with more than 200 kids of all ages in attendance, eager to learn how telescopes work, and how to use one! Check out my blog on the workshop, complete with a video, which will give you a pretty good sense of how much was going on that evening!