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If visitors to College of The Albemarle’s Star Party on the evening of Friday, September 6 peered through the telescope carefully, they could spot a tiny Saturn in the sky, its distinctive rings glowing brightly.

College of The Albemarle hosts “Evening Under the Stars” quarterly. The Dare campus hosted the party on September 6 from 7 to 9 p.m. out on the college lawn.

Parties are free to the public and feature various stations with telescopes set up for viewing different parts of the sky. Though the evening was cloudy, there were still some stars and planets to observe. COA instructors and staff were present to point out visible stars and explain how to use the telescopes.

“I get to teach people the way the universe works. That’s the best thing I could possibly do,” said astronomy instructor Todd Krueger when asked why the college hosts these events.

“It’s just fun to be able to show people high tech apparatus that they wouldn’t have access to any other way. It’s the best way for people to get a feel for what hands-on astronomy is like. It’s fun to show people Saturn for the first time, to show them craters in the moon. There’s a lot of joy that tends to come with it.”

Before the sky gets dark, tables are set up on the lawn with activities for children. This quarter, the theme was “optics.” One station explained how a telescope works, another station demonstrated black lights and the different colors that glow under them. There were also take-home crafts and games.

While the optic activities were enjoyable, Krueger said they were trying to make the case that NASA’s Webb Space Telescope, the largest telescope in space, is the next phase of astronomy. Launched on Christmas Day 2021, the telescope’s first image was released to the public in July 2022.

“The Webb is turning out new images of the cosmos all the time that are teaching us tons of new things but it’s all in the invisible parts of the spectrum,” Krueger said. “The Webb telescope is not giving us visible light pictures – it’s in the deep infrared, part of the spectrum you can’t see ourselves, part of the spectrum that allows us to see through dust and see back in time farther than ever before.”

COA offers an astronomy class at the Elizabeth City campus each semester, and on a rotation at the other campuses. There is also a new flex plan, which offers astronomy online or in-person.

The next Evening Under the Stars is scheduled for October 18 at COA-Elizabeth City.

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