Mark your calendars for BSU’s largest First Friday Astronomy event on October 3rd. It is called the Stellar Collective 2025 and will occur on October 3, 2025 from 2:00 – 9:30 pm. It is FREE! Get your FREE tickets!
To quote their website: Stellar Collective 2025 will bring together astronomers, science YouTubers, and renowned researchers for an afternoon of discussions, practical demonstrations, and interactive talks about what makes astronomy the humanistic hobby of tomorrow.
Mark the date on your calendars, sign up for the free tickets, and come out for a truly memorable First Friday in Astronomy at Boise State University in Boise Idaho. The location for this event is the Special Event Center on the Boise State campus just north of the Student Union Building. Parking can be found at the Lincoln Avenue Parking Garage. Information concerning the conference and free tickets can be found at https://www.stellarcollective.io.
SCHEDULE
- 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM
Doors Open: Check In Begins
Doors to the event space will open and guests will check in.
- 2:00 PM – 2:15 PM
Welcome to Stellar Collective Conference
Introduction to the conference
- 2:15 PM – 3:00 PM
Franck Marchis – Sky Mapper
- 3:10 PM – 3:55 PM
Lauren Sgro – LaserSETI: Expanding the Search
LaserSETI is the first optical SETI survey to scan all the sky, all the time, for laser pulses originating outside of our Solar System. Since optical lasers can’t be created by any known astrophysical processes, such a discovery would indicate either new science or a signpost of extraterrestrial intelligence. The current LaserSETI network scans about a third of the night sky from the Northern Hemisphere and will continue to expand until that coverage increases to nearly 100%. But keeping track of the entire sky produces a lot of data, and that’s where you will come in as the LaserSETI mission continues. In this talk, we will discuss the basics of SETI research, the LaserSETI instruments and network, and where we will go from here – together.
- 4:05 PM – 4:50 PM
Jackie Faherty – Backyard Worlds
Backyard Worlds – Planet 9 is a citizen science project that invites people from around the world to search the sky in infrared light for previously missed nearby worlds. Over the past eight years they have found thousands of low mass stars and brown dwarfs — objects that lack enough mass for sustained nuclear burning. Participants in the project have been team members of NASA JWST,HST and Spitzer space telescope programs as well as run NASA telescope facilities with the help of core science members.
- 5:00 PM – 5:45 PM
Patrick Treuthardt – Unusual Black Holes and How to Find Them
Nearly every large galaxy appears to host a supermassive black hole in its nucleus, whose mass ranges from millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun. The origin of these black holes is still not understood but rare, intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs; ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the Sun) may shed light on the problem. Measuring the mass of a nuclear black hole requires significant telescope resources, so a method of identifying a few probable candidates is necessary. Dr. Patrick Treuthardt will discuss an efficient means of identifying spiral galaxies that potentially harbor IMBHs with the help of citizen scientists, all-sky surveys, and existing scaling relations.
Associated Research Project: Spiral Graph and Spiral Graph: Cluster Buster
- 5:50 PM – 6:30 PM
Appetizers and Poster Session
Apply here for poster Session
- 6:35 PM – 7:20 PM
Pamela Gay – CosmoQuest and Beyond
- 7:30 PM – 8:30 PM
with Rachel Huchmala (Telescopes For Teachers) and more
- 8:45 PM – 9:30 PM
SETI Institute Citizen Science Observation Sponsored by Unistellar
Evenings can get chilly, especially during stargazing. We recommend bringing a jacket, hat, or gloves to stay warm and enjoy the night sky! Sponsored by Unistellar.
Boise Astronomical Society 