Hopewell Furnace Hosting Starfest Aug. 24

Blogger's Note: The following was provided by Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site.

Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site is happy to announce 2019 Star Fest program. 

The program is in partnership with the Chesmont Astronomical Society. 

This free event will be held on the grounds of Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site Aug. 24, from 6 to 11:30 p.m. 

Rain or cloudy skies may postpone the event to the cloud/rain dates of Sunday, Aug. 25, Saturday Aug. 31 or Sunday, Sept. 1. 

Within 24 hours of the event, the park's website will post any changes to the event due to weather.

There will be approximately 20 telescopes set up for use, looking at heavenly objects.

Here is a schedule of activities:

• 6:00 – Kid’s Corner Educational Activities;
• 7:00 – Opening comments from Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site, ChesMont Astronomical Society and Pennsylvania Outdoor Lighting Council
• 7:30 – 9:15 Guest Speaker Presentations
• Speaker 1: Rob Cordivari, ChesMont Astronomical Society, "You Are Here," a look at the size and scale of the Universe
• Speaker 2: James Aguirre, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania
• 9:30 to 11:30 - Night Sky Observations

Parking is available on site. Due to the number of participants, it may require a short walk from the parking area to the observation area. Snacks will be available for purchase. Please wear comfortable shoes and bring a flashlight!

Information on the event is available by calling Hopewell Furnace NHS at 610-582-8773, through the National Park Service: www.nps.gov/hofu and the ChesMont Astronomical Society at www.chesmont.org

Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site preserves and interprets an early American industrial landscape and community. Showcasing an iron making community and its surrounding countryside, Hopewell Furnace was active from 1771 to 1883. 

The park’s facilities are currently open daily, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. It is closed Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. Hopewell Furnace is located five miles south of Birdsboro, PA, off of Route 345. 

 Admission to the park is free. For more information, stop by the park's visitor center, call 610-582-8773, or visit the park's web site at www.nps.gov/hofu

Starfest Celebrates 20 Years Aug. 11th (Or 12th)

Blogger's Note: The following was provided by the  ChesMont Astronomical Society

The region's annual opportunity to get a guided tour of the heavens rolls around for the 20th year Saturday, Aug. 11, thanks to the ChesMont Astronomical Society.

Barring cloud-cover, that's when the 20th annual Starfest will be held at Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site from 5:30 to 11:30 p.m. 

The rain/cloud date is Sunday, Aug. 12.

If the entire weekend is washed out, the back-up weekend is Aug. 18 and Aug. 19, although Keynote Speaker Derrick Pitts will not be available on those dates.

The program will feature speakers, astronomy presentations, and activities for kids. 

10 ChesMont Astronomical society members will set up their
telescopes 

to focus on 10 different celestial objects for easy
viewing by visitors.

Public viewing of the wonders of the Milky Way will be available through more than twenty amateur, high-end telescopes.

The highlight of the evening is 10 Object Row. 10 of society members' telescopes will be focused on a different deep sky object so the public gets a variety of astronomical objects to look at.

Admission and parking is free. Donations are greatly appreciated and needed to support the event.

This year's keynote speaker is Derrick Pitts, Chief Astronomer, Franklin Institute Science Museum

Pitts is currently the Chief Astronomer and Director of the Fels Planetarium at The Franklin Institute.

He’s also been a NASA Solar System Ambassador since 2009 and serves as the “Astrobiology Ambassador” for the NASA/MIRS/UNCF Special Program Corporation’s Astrobiology Partnership Program.

Derrick Pitts

One of his most recent honors is an appointment to the outreach advisory board for the world’s largest telescope, the new 30-Meter-Telescope at Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

 He has been named as one of the 50 most important African-Americans in research science.

For more than two decades, Pitts has hosted award-winning astronomy radio programs for
Philadelphia’s two public radio stations and created signature astronomy television programming for PBS.

One of the highlights of his career was meeting President Obama and his family when he
was invited to participate in the first-ever White House Star Party.

Dr. Pitts is a graduate of Germantown Academy St. Lawrence University, and has received honorary Doctor of Science degrees[7] from La Salle University and Rowan University College of Mathematics and Science[

His twitter handle is @CoolAstronomer and his motto is “Eat, breathe, do science. Sleep later.”

Here is a schedule of the evening's events:

• 5:30 pm Gates Open (Solar observing if clear)
• 6:00 pm Kids Corner Educational Activities.
• 7:00 pm Opening Remarks
• 7:30 pm James Aguirre, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania
• 8:15 pm Keynote Speaker Derrick Pitts
• 9:15 Drawing of the Grand Prize followed by Public stargazing through Amateur Telescopes.

More information about the program is available by calling Hopewell at 610-582-8773, ext. 0, or visiting the Chesmont Astronomical Society website at www.chesmontastro.org or on Facebook at Chesmont Astronomical Society observing+

Starfest Set for this Weekend (Weather Permitting)

This year's "Starfest" stargazing event will be held on Saturday, Aug. 8 (or on Sunday, Aug., 9 if it rains.)

This extremely cool event, which will be held the weekend of Aug. 15 and Aug. 16 if the weather refuses to cooperate, is brought to you by the Chesmont Astronomical Society.

It will be held at Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site, which has an official address of 2 Bird Lane, Elverson, but is off Route 345.

It begins at 5:30 p.m. and will run through 11:30 p.m.

The program will feature speakers, astronomy presentations, and activities for kids. 

 Public viewing of the wonders of the Milky Way will be available through more than twenty amateur and high-end telescopes. 

 Admission and parking is free. Donations are greatly appreciated and needed to support the event.

Here is the schedule:

• 5:30 -- Gates Open
• 6 to 7 --  Kids Corner Educational Activities.
• 7 to 7:30 -- Opening Remarks from Chesmont Astronomical Society President Dan Acker
• 7:35 to 8:15 -- Darker Skies, Brighter Stars - Vacation Adventures from Dark Places, Dr. Robert Werkman, ChesMont Astronomical Society
• 8:20 to 9:15 Keynote Speaker – Peter Detterline - Boyertown Area Senior High. his talk will focus on his newly appointed position as Astronomy Ambassador to Chile.
• 9:15 -- Drawing of the Grand Prize followed by Public stargazing through Amateur Telescopes. 

After that, its time to look at the stars.

More information about the program is available by calling Hopewell at 610-582-8773, ext. 0, or visiting the Chesmont Astronomical Society website at www.chesmontastro.org.

Put Your Head in the Stars

Photo by Frank Colosimo

Just one of the many nebulae on which Starfest telescopes will be trained Saturday night.

Blogger's Note: While we would normally reserve an entry like this for our wildly popular "This Saturday in Science" series, the timing would not benefit our friends at the Chesmont Astronomical Society, so we are posting it today, so you have time to mark your calendar.

The line-up from a previous Starfest.

The Chesmont Astronomical Society invites you and your family to Starfest 2013, at Hopewell Furnace National Historical Site on Saturday, Aug. 10, starting at 7 p.m..

The hallmark annual star party will feature a line-up of speakers, door prizes, and a variety of telescopes to observe the wonders of the night sky.

Visitors can listen to speakers present on various astronomy-related topics, and when nightfall sets in and the stars emerge, join society members at their telescopes trained on different types of celestial objects, such as planets, galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters. 

Photo by Frank Colosimo

The Ring nebula

Those who come early can see the telescopes during daylight.

The event is weather dependant, and will move to Sunday, Aug. 11, in case of cloudy or rainy conditions on the scheduled date.

You can check for updates at www.chesmontastro.org.

Prizes will include a 102mm Celestron refractor telescope with mount and eyepieces and a 80mm Orion telescope with mount and eyepieces, plus limited quantities of astronomy material.

Here is the schedule:

• 6 to 7:30 p.m.: Astronomy-related presentations
  
• 7:30 to 8 p.m.: Dark sky preservation talk
• 8 to 8:45 p.m.: Guest speaker
• 8:45 to 9 p.m.: Drawing for telescope prizes
• 9 to 11 p.m.: Stargazing 

The event is free for all ages and free parking is available, but cash donations are appreciated.

So grab your kids, bring a lawn chair, and come learn about the night sky!

The Heavens Move and so does Starfest -- to Sunday!

The telescopes set up in Hopewell Furnace for Starfest are not small.

This just in: thanks to the never-ending cycle of ungodly heat followed by torrential rains, our friends at the Chesmont Astronomical Society have had to re-schedule their annual Starfest event to tomorrow.

This year's event offers an excellent chance to observe the Perseid meteor shower.


If you read Tuesday's post about the spectacular landing on Mars, you know how cool the Starfest event is.

But if you missed it, although I can't imagine why, here is the poster that outlines all the cool stuff that goes on there.

If this too fails, thanks to cloud cover or other weather-related interference, the next back-up date is the following Saturday, Aug. 18.

Click here if you need directions to Hopewell Furnace.

And if you can't make it Sunday, the folks at Chesmont hold monthly "star parties" at French Creek and Marsh Creek state parks for those who want to get a wider view of the universe.

Get Your Space Geek On!

No, it's not the cover of a 1950s Sci-Fi pulp fiction novel. It's a rendering of what NASA did yesterday on Mars.

So if you grew up watching Star Trek re-runs on a black and white TV like I did; saw the first "Star Wars" movie in a theater with only one screen; or read Larry Niven, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov science fiction novels until your eyes bled, chances are you're got your space geek on this weekend about what we did on Mars yesterday.

I never understood Star Trek "red shirt" jokes until I got
a color television.

In case you don't know, we landed a rover the size of a Mini-Cooper on the red planet by lowering it on cables from a platform hovering above the plant's surface that was held aloft by rockets.

James Bond would have been proud.

The maneuver was so complicated and difficult, that the NASA engineers who created it dubbed the approach and landing "Seven Minutes of Terror." Their terror turned to joy, (as the video below shows), when the entire landing went off without a hitch.

(In case the video embed didn't work, you can click here to watch the video.)


Their anxiety was understandable, I suppose, when you consider that the whole shebang was approaching the Martian surface at 13,000 miles per hour.

And while James Bond gets to drive cool cars wherever he goes, he's got nothing on Scott Maxwell.

Maxwell is one of a dozen people trained to drive Curiosity, as the rover is named, from a driver's seat more than 100 million miles away.

Photo poached from CNN
Why is this man smiling? Because Scott Maxwell
gets to drive a car on Mars.

Maxwell has a pretty simple explanation of what he does, offered on his blog, called, appropriately, "Mars and Me."

He wrote:  "At night, there's a small red light in the sky. On that light lives four hundred pounds of thinking metal sent from Earth. I tell that metal what to do, and it does it."

(You can also follow him on Twitter @marsroverdriver, as I just did, where he answers questions like "what kind of mileage does that thing get?")

I am not the only person in the Pottstown area excited about this.

The folks over at the Chestmont Astronomical Society had some links to the landing posted on their web site, which is where I found the video I posted above.

They have good reason to be excited.

The timing gets people excited about space exploration just in time for their annual Starfest star gazing event.

Dozesn of amateur astronomers set up some pretty spectacular telescopes, trained in specific celestial objects that you can view with their help.

The event is free, although making a donation would be much appreciated.

Held this Saturday from 4 to 11 p.m., this year's Starfest will be held at a new location: Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site. (The rain date is Sunday.)

This year's guest speaker, Dr. H. John Wood, is the lead optics engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope.

 Mars and Starfest have a strong local history together.

Back in 2003 when Mars got closer to Earth than it had been in 50,000 to 60,000  years, the Starfest held in Warwick County Park had a huge turn-out, estimated at 2,500 people.

In the lead up to that event, I had about as much fun as I've ever had writing something for The Mercury when I wrote a two-day package of stories about Mars, the history of our fascination with it, it's role in our culture and the science behind the latest discoveries about the planet.

(This link will take you to the first day's story, about the science of Mars close approach, published on Aug. 17, 2003.

This link will take you to the second day's story, published on Aug. 18, 2003, which dealt with how Mars has affected human culture and civilization. That day's package also had a timeline of Mars through human history.)

Oddly enough, in all my science fiction choices as a kid, and yes, currently as well, I always passed over works about Mars (with the exception of Bradbury's Chronicles) because it seemed too close; not exotic enough.

But given the stage we human beings are at with our space travel, you've got to play the game that's in town and I imagine, we will be focused on Mars for a long, long time.