Every year, Northwestern University’s Athletics group helps to organize an “NU STEM and Sports Event”, where Boy Scouts and their families come to campus before a Northwestern Wildcats football game, tour labs and other facilities, and learn about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) research in Evanston. As part of that program, about 80 participants (Boy Scouts and their families) visited Dearborn Observatory, where graduate student Matthew Rickert and Assistant Director of Operations John Everett showed them the Dearborn telescope, helped them learn about the nature of light and black holes, and answered questions about everything from why telescopes are built on mountains, to spaceships the size of Illinois, to implanting brains in robots. (Ok, we couldn’t actually answer that last one.)