Summer is in full swing in Milwaukee and for us, the start of August still means there’s plenty of festivals and activities around the city. The summer season has also inspired our astronomy contributor Jean Creighton to get outside as well.
Creighton is the director of UW-Milwaukee’s Manfred Olson Planetarium, and she, along with UWM student Jack Koshkin, put together a new family-friendly summer astronomy program that you can see on August 6 and September 17 as a part of the 2023 Sunday Family Fun Day event series at the Northwestern Mutual Community Park in the Summerfest grounds.
The 40-minute show covers a lot of astronomical content — from summer constellations, eclipses, the Persied meteor shower, plus the opportunity for audience members to actually hold a meteorite.
"I wanted to have one of my staff with me so that it could be a two-person show and we could sort of bounce ideas off each other as well. I also wanted the talent and the freshness that Jack would bring to it, and perhaps a way of engaging as many people and as many ages as we could," says Creighton while describing the collaboration.
Koshkin adds, "I thought that was one of the most interesting parts of the process, the two of us in a room imagining how are people going to respond to this and then trying to tune things to make it more fun."
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