We had a great kickoff to the fall AOW season at the Robert Shaw STEAM center in Katy which is one of our premiere AOW events that we have been covering for many years.
With the construction and expansion of the building, we setup on the northwest corner of the building which gave us a good view of the Sun and Moon and Leonard Ferguson presented in a classroom just inside from our telescope setup area. The skies were mostly clear and the temps cooled off nicely with lower humidity.
Amelia and Steve Goldberg brought their famous pink dobsonian Astraea which caught the attention of all the girls and Steve assisted with crowd control. Steve had a counter and counted 205 students and parents. Amelia was on the thin crescent Moon.
Sean Carey brought the club’s new Lunt Solar scope which we were able to use at the start of the event as the Sun was still up and Joe Dellinger brought his AstroPhysics Traveller refractor and started with a solar filter and later switched to the Moon. Joe was able to get a cellphone shot through the Lunt showing some prominences and filaments. We are still learning how to best use the Lunt for outreach but it did well for its first outreach.
After the Sun went down Sean setup his Galileo telescope and pointed it at the Moon. This is a replica of one of Galileo’s telescope and showed the Moon really well. I had the opportunity to use it myself as Sean packed up the Lunt and it was a fun scope to use.
Inside Leonard gave three presentations of a shortened version of the NASA mission updates he gave to the club at the last meeting which were well attended.
It is always a great event at Robert Shaw in Katy as it is always well attended by parents and students and they have many activities going on. We will have a repeat on November 7th.
A big thanks to all the FBAC volunteers who were able to make it out to support this event.
Astronomy On Wheels – 9/26/25 – Katy ISD STEM Night
