Astronomy On Wheels – 11/07/25 – Katy STEM Center

It was a happening night at the Robert Shaw STEAM center in Katy and FBAC showed up in numbers to support this event. It was another great turn out with hundreds of students and parents attending. As always our hosts Liz Dethloff and Stephen Adams made sure we had everything we needed for our indoor presenters and outside telescope operators.

Inside presenters were Don Cooper (Apollo to the Moon and Back) and Bill Spizzirri (Meteors and Meteorites). As this was a STEAM night with many activities going on, Don and Bill alternated doing 20-minute versions of their presentations with each doing two.

Bill brought his personal meteorite collection and allowed the students to touch them at the end of his presentation stating that they will never touch anything older.

Don wowed students with his play by play of the Apollo 11 mission demonstrated with his model of the Saturn V rocket with Apollo capsule that he and his team wrote the guidance calculations for back in the 1960s. He had great questions like: “How did they know where they were without GPS?”

Outside on the patio area we had a great volunteer attendance.

• Wendy Walfoort with the club loaner Astrophotography/EAA Scope
• Tony Wiese with the club’s 5 inch AOW refractor
• Becky Brewer with large binoculars on a parallelogram mount.
• Joel Brewer with his Dwarf 3 smart scope
• Sean Carey with a large Celestron refractor and Galileo scope
• Todd Dunnavant with the club’s binoculars on a parallelogram mount
• Mac Hooton and his brother Rob with a SeeStar smart scope

The sky conditions were difficult for the visual scopes and binoculars as only bright stars could be seen with the naked eye and there was no Moon, but Saturn came to the rescue.

The EAA/Smart scopes really shined. Wendy was showing the dumbbell nebula and Joel had an amazing image of the Andromeda Galaxy being generated by his Dwarf 3.

The father and son team of Matt and Owen Linnell operated Sean’s Galileo scope during the event and assisted with setup and tear down. It was really great having them as their help was definitely needed and appreciated. You don’t need to bring a scope or do a presentation to have an impact on these events.

A big thanks to all the FBAC volunteers who showed up to make this an amazing event.