Courtesy of HerdLink

The MU Astronomy Club hosts its speaker series every other Friday this semester.

The Marshall University Astronomy Club is currently hosting a virtual speaker series on YouTube during the Fall 2024 Semester.

“For our virtual speaker series, this is something that we have drawn inspiration from the Society of Physics Students,” Astronomy Club President Hannah Turner said. “They have had a preexistent virtual speaker series in which they have invited knowledgeable individuals, typically professors, from different universities to give virtual talks via Zoom and YouTube, so we modeled our speaker series from them.”

The virtual speaker series features professors from West Virginia University, Ohio State University and the University of Kentucky. 

“Our main goal for this series is that putting this material out there, we can get more discussion for astronomy in our surrounding communities,” Turner said. 

Future virtual speaker series speakers will be Maura McLaughlin on Sept. 20, Thomas Troland on Oct. 4 and Isaac Shlosman on Oct. 18 all beginning at 6 p.m.

“We try to do a lot of STEM outreach with the communities,” associate professor and adviser Sean Mcbride said. “We’ve done many things for the community in terms of outreach, especially targeting the younger students in the area.”

The club says its ultimate goal for the club as a whole is to not only to have an astronomy major or minor available at Marshall, but to also reach out and inspire younger students in the area to new opportunities previously unavailable to them. 

“Anyone from any major can join; we have people here that are not even science majors,” McBride said. “We really want to find those armchair astronomers or just people who are interested in astronomy to come to our meetings.”

“I think about events such as the eclipse viewing that we hosted back in the spring,” Turner said. “It’s really incredible when you see the progress that we have made and what we have accomplished so far, so it really gives everyone here excitement for what we can accomplish in the future with this club.” 

The Marshall University Astronomy Club has been active since 2022. However, this is not the first iteration of the club. 

“To our knowledge, this club was preexistent, and it had quite a few members,” Turner said. “However, when we started it in 2022, all of those members either graduated or just gave up on the club, so we saw an opportunity there to expand the club.”

“A student who was a previous officer came up to me and said, ‘I want to pass this on to someone. I don’t exactly want to see it die, but I don’t have time for it anymore.’ So, I started to advertise the club, and we started with only two students on the first meeting, but we have been growing ever since,” McBride said.

Future meetings for the Astronomy Club will begin at 7 p.m. in Room 179 of the Science Building on Sept. 18, Oct. 2, Oct. 16 and Nov. 13. 

Nate Harrah can be contacted at [email protected]