Astro 101: Night Sky Tour and Tutorial

This event is one of several different introductions to astronomy offered by SJAA. Here, we'll prepare you for the subsequent In-Town Star Party and for your own explorations of the sky with a planetarium tour and mini Stellarium tutorial. We'll show you how to navigate and learn about the night sky using this software and help you plan your own observing sessions with a telescope, binoculars or just your eyeballs.

Stellarium is open source software that you can get and run for yourself. Native versions for Windows, MacOS and Linux are free to download from https://stellarium.org/. Stellarium also offers a less powerful but still quite capable version that runs directly in a web browser at https://stellarium-web.org/.

For this event, your presenter will be Rashi Girdhar, a seasoned backyard astronomer and longtime SJAA member with a deep fascination for outer space, both science and history. Join us as we reclaim the lessons of the past to better understand our place in the cosmos. Through this seasonal series and our other SJAA sessions, you will truly become a Celestial Explorer. Bring your curiosity; we’ll provide the universe!

This talk is free of charge. Just come and enjoy the show. After the talk, you can check out telescopes that will be set up as part of our In-Town Star Party. (See In Town Star Party event on Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/sj-astronomy/events/315826792/)

Many of SJAA’s events, like this one, are public and free to attend, but if you’re enjoying what SJAA has to offer, consider becoming a paid member for only $20 per year: https://www.sjaa.net/membership/benefits-of-membership-2/

During this event, we will ask all visitors to sign in, so that we can report attendance numbers to the city of San Jose, as San Jose has made Houge Park facilities available to SJAA to serve the public. The sign-in form will not require any detailed personal information.

The title image is a screenshot of Stellarium, showing the summer night sky from Bay Area towards the south.