by Robert Vanderbei, PhD  assist.director@princetonastronomy.org

The Star Party Event at the Institute for Advanced Study.  On Friday, February 21, 2025, there was an evening star party event at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) here in Princeton NJ.   Lia Medeiros started hosting these events once per year back in 2020.  In those first few years, she was an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the IAS.   It is her passion to reach out to the broad public, and especially young kids, about astronomy.   At each of these star party events, she has given a 30-minute talk about astronomy mostly aimed at inspiring an interest in astronomy to the kids in the audience.   At this year’s event, the talk was at 5:30pm in a building right next to the large green lawn behind the IAS’s main building (aka Fuld Hall).

The star party was announced to everyone associated with the IAS.   Because the room for the talk had a fixed number of seats (250), registration was required to attend Lia’s talk.   The stargazing part of the event was outdoors and open to the public.   I did not attend Lia’s talk since I needed some time to set up my telescope.  Because I didn’t attend, I can’t give any details about the talk but Lia did tell me that the room was full.   There were 250 registered attendees most/all of whom spent some time stargazing with us after the talk.

I was only one of about 10 astronomers (most of whom are AAAP members) who brought a telescope to the event.   I don’t remember all the folks who helped out with the event but here’s those that I think were there… 

Bill Funcheon,  Bill Murray,  Dave Wilton,  Gaspar Bakos,  Gene Allen,  George Wong, Hongkun Zhao,  Jeffrey Beck,  Karry Lam, Ron Geck,  Sihao Cheng, Siming Ji,  Todd Spencer,  Victor Davis, Vivek Vijayakumar, and me.

Most of them are AAAP members.

Here’s some of the things we pointed our telescopes at:  Mars, Jupiter, Venus, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), the Pleiades (M45), the open clusters M36, M37, M38, the Horsehead and Flame nebulas.   As part of the event, David Wilton got some nice pics taken with his Dwarf II telescope.   Here they are…

The deep sky and the earthlings…