Ask Suzy Gurton, Education Manager at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, about hands-on astronomy, and you’ll be disabused of any notion that studying the cosmos need be a solely intellectual pursuit.
She’ll remind you that building your own telescope is very hands-on, as is experimenting with colored filters and simple spectroscopes to understand how images […]

When astronomer Isabel Hawkins was growing up in Argentina, an encyclopedia salesman showed up at the door one day with an illustrated book about the planets.
“There was this one picture of Jupiter” says Isabel, “floating in the blackness of space. It was that image, of this mysterious planet, this exotic world surrounded in blackness, that […]

Educator Cheryl McCallum talks about one of her favorite SMILE outdoor activities, and how to make it work even if you don’t have “an outdoor space teeming with living things.”
These days, I work in a museum. But before that I was an “outdoor educator,” taking 5th graders on hikes through the East Texas Piney […]