Some of you may recall an earlier blog post where I said that the raffle for 2020 would be the Pikes Peak Observatory. Well, PPO is a project of NSSTI, and they told us that they are currently waiting on various approvals before moving forward, but their other related project, MESO—The Mobile Earth + Space Observatory is very much moving forward, and would we please consider changing our planned donation to that?
Once we learned about MESO, we were very happy to do so. MESO is a “‘science center on wheels’ to engage and excite students, teachers, and local residents with hands-on educational and research activities focused on earth and space sciences, renewable energy, and scientific instrumentation.”
Or to put it another way, it is a large vehicle packed full of cool scientific equipment and experiments that students and others can play with!
It gets cooler, though. You know when you see something designed for kids that you really want to play with, but you can’t, because it’s for kids?
Well the great people at MESO get that, and so they are bringing the MESO vehicle down to the convention on Friday so that we can all check it out as well! It will be in the East Parking Lot of the hotel from 2pm – 8pm. Sadly, they had another commitment on Saturday, so they will only be there on Friday–a good reason to show up early :-).
Apparently the Orion Nebula will be especially visible on Friday!