Join us for our second annual Astronomy Festival at Tower Grove Park! Enjoy a full day of festivities for all ages at this free, public event. Our schedule includes:
Friday, September 29
7:00-8:30pm: The Story collider podcast kickoff event
St. Louis Public Radio Community Room, located at 3651 Olive Street, St. Louis, MO, 63108
Join us for our kickoff event with The Story Collider on Friday, September 29! / Sponsored by the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.
saturday, september 30
3:00pm-5:00pm: vendor fair
West End of Tower Grove Park, West Drive.
Explore a variety of hands-on educational activities from our event partners, including:
DIY rocket launches with Challenger Learning Center
Solar telescope viewing (sunspotters) with St. Louis Astronomical Society
International Dark-Sky Association—Missouri / Lights Out Heartland
DIY solar system necklaces with Tower Grove Park Education
Institute for Multi-messenger Astrophysics and Cosmology, Physics Department, Missouri University of Science and Technology
Drone demonstrations with STL From Above
Nocturnal animals table with Missouri Department of Conservation
Department of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis
Meteorites and planetary globes with the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis
Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at St. Louis University
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Solar System Ambassadors
The Story Collider Podcast / St. Louis Public Radio (Join us for our kickoff event with The Story Collider on Friday, September 29!)
Handmade goods for sale from Galactic Crunch, Madison’s Lane, Sweet Ginkgo, Consecrated Creations, Tiny Forest Studio, OKA, Naa-Dodua Ankrah, Originial DaVinci Arts and No Coast Threads.
If you’d like to apply to sell handmade goods during the Vendor Fair, please email education@towergrovepark.org.
Food will be available for sale from Spud Shack and Dynamic Dishes from 3:00-8:00pm.
4:00pm-6:00pm: Nature Night Film: Wall-e
West End of Tower Grove Park, West Drive.
Join us for a special screening of Wall-E, in conjunction with our Nature Night Film Series! This event is support by the U.S. Forest Service Urban Connections program.
Film screen will be setup on West Dr, facing east into the grassy field between the New Comfort Station and Stone Shelter. Navigate to either the Stone Shelter (4490 Northwest Dr, St. Louis, MO 63110) or New Comfort Station (4501 Southwest Dr, St. Louis, MO 63110) to find the location. Biking or walking is encouraged!
NO SEATS will be provided. Please plan to bring your own picnic blankets or chairs. To ensure everyone can see and enjoy the film, chairs will only be allowed in the back end of the field, which will be designated with signage.
5:00pm-7:00pm: mobile planetarium star shows
Piper Palm House, 4271 Northeast Drive, St. Louis, MO, 63110.
Enjoy the stories of the stars through viewing constellations in a mobile planetarium, brought to you by Challenger Learning Center. The planetarium shows run 15-minutes long, and will have limited capacity. You can reserve a space in advance at the link below. There will be 10 walk-up seats reserved for every show as well.
6:00pm-7:00pm: Astronomy on tap lecture
West End of Tower Grove Park, West Drive.
Enjoy a talk on exoplanets with Dr. Tansu Daylan, Assistant Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis.
“The Universe is teeming with planets, but where does the Earth stand among them?”
Exploration of planets beyond our Solar System, i.e., exoplanets, continues to fuel our wonder and motivates us to seek bold answers to outstanding questions in planet formation, evolution, and orbital migration. Since its launch in 2018, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has been pivotal in expanding our catalog of known exoplanets. The telescope has enabled us to identify over 6,700 TESS Objects of Interest (TOIs) that are being monitored by ground-based observatories to potentially confirm their planetary nature. The wide-field cameras of TESS have extended Kepler Space Telescope's previous search for small exoplanets to bright stars across the celestial sphere, enabling the discovery of worlds particularly amenable to atmospheric characterization. The confirmed exoplanets constitute a plethora of Earth-sized worlds to gas giants with a wide distribution of temperatures, allowing us to explore their rich atmospheric properties during transit using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). More recently, the successful launch and commissioning of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has facilitated new leaps in our ability to characterize exoatmospheres at infrared wavelengths, leading to the first spectral detection of carbon dioxide on an exoplanet.
Presentation on LED screen. This is an outdoor lecture - please plan to bring your own folding chairs or picnic blankets!
Talk sponsored by the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences.
Audio description services provided by MindsEye Radio. ASL Interpretation Services provided by AMB Interpreting Services.
6:30-7:30: Night hikes
West End Picnic Site (meeting location)/ Gaddy Bird Garden
A Naturalist will lead a series of guided walks through the West End of the park to search for night critters that call Tower Grove Park home. We’ll listen for owls, look for eyeshine, and see moths and more in the dark. Walks are 20-30 minutes long and will be walk-up within the time range with extremely limited capacity, with tour departures at 6:30 and 7:00pm. We recommend checking in 30 minutes early to ensure you can get a spot in the tour.
7:00PM-7:30PM: Story time with SLPL
West End of Tower Grove Park, West Drive.
Staff from St. Louis Public Library will lead a space storytime at 7:00pm!
7:00pm-9:00pm: stargazing & Telescope viewing
Stone Shelter, 4490 Northwest Dr, St. Louis, MO 63110.
Get a special view of the moon, planets, and stars through telescopes provided by St. Louis Astronomical Society. On this date, we expect to be able to view the full Harvest Moon, as well as Saturn and some stars, contingent upon clear skies.
Audio description services provided by MindsEye Radio during the Astronomy on Tap lecture.