Astronomy on Tap Flagstaff | The View from Mount Graham: What it Means to Do Astronomy

Join Lowell Observatory and Mother Road Brewing Co. on July 28th at 6:30pm for Astronomy on Tap! Listen to fascinating science talks, play trivia to win out-of-this-world prizes, and of course, enjoy Mother Road brews on tap. Come early, seats fill up fast!

This month’s speaker is Kennedy Farrell PhD candidate in Astronomy & Planetary Science at Northern Arizona University. She will be talking about about how observational astronomy is changing as robotic observatories, massive sky surveys, and artificial intelligence transform how discoveries are made, while the long, unglamorous nights operating telescopes become less common. Through stories from the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope on Mount Graham, from observing runs at one of the darkest sites in the world to endangered red squirrels and wildfires, this talk explores what it looks like to do astronomy in practice. In the era of petabyte-sized astronomical data archives, discoveries of the asteroids and comets that tell the story of the early solar system are made by Citizen Scientist volunteers examining these haystacks of data. As astronomy continues to evolve and data haystacks grow, the view from Mount Graham reveals the fundamentally human practice of looking up.