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Boy Scouts and their Families visit Dearborn Observatory as part of NU Athletics STEM & Sports Day

For the third year in a row, NU Athletics invited Boy Scouts and their families to explore the wide variety of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) research at Northwestern University. This year, as part of that program, about 70 people visited Dearborn Observatory on Saturday, September 12th. In Dearborn’s classroom, graduate student Zach Hafen explained how we learn about galaxies by building computer simulations of them; then, everyone got a chance to see Dearborn’s historic telescope, and view the Sun, helped by graduate student Matthew Rickert and CIERA Asst. Director of Operations John Everett. As usual with this very interactive group, we spent most of our time answering a wide variety of questions (from kids with ages of about 6 to about 35!) about how telescopes work, to what happened before the Big Bang.