AstroFest
Welcome to AstroFest!
The Penn State Eberly College of Science’s popular AstroFest program, a longtime outreach of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2024. We will be back in 2025 as we take our first step towards year 50! We will follow our typical schedule, from Wednesday evening, July 9 through Saturday July 12, this four-night festival of astronomy activities and stargazing will run from 8:30 to 11:30 p.m. each night during the 2025 Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts.
AstroFest will offer visitors of all ages a variety of fun and educational activities. The public is encouraged to come enjoy the night sky and the wonders of astronomy with us at Davey Lab, located across from the HUB-Robeson Center on the Penn State University Park campus. Events are free and will occur rain or shine, both in classrooms and in the planetarium on the fifth floor of Davey Lab.
For 2025, we will have a lot of your favorite activites return:
- Kids' activities
- Water rockets
- Ooblek crater making
- How to find planets demos
- Tour of the scale model Solar System
- Tour of the Universe timeline
- Make a comet demo
- Try out the Astro videogame
- Astronomy Jeopardy with prizes
- Astrogami painting
- NASA Swift satellite booth
-
Black hole gravity demo
This year, though, we will also have several new stations for you to try:
- A new scavenger hunt with prizes that will take you to see a historical microscope
- Live telescope observing from around the world with SLOOH
- Save the cat: a quantum escape room
As always, there will be planetarium shows, rooftop stargazing with telescopes, and feature presentations.
The presentations for this year will include:
- The Lifecycle of Stars (Wed to Sat)
- Planets, Planets, Everywhere! (Wed & Sat)
- Just Blow Up Already! (Wed & Thu)
- Crash Course in Gravitational Waves (Wed & Thu)
- History of Women in Astronomy (Wed & Thu)
- Viewing the Milky Way with Neutrinos (Wed & Thu)
- Aurora: More than Pretty Lights (Wed & Fri)
- Mind-Bending Black Holes (Wed & Thu)
- Where Anthropology meets Astronomy (Thu & Fri)
- The Search for Life in Pop Culture (Fri only)
- Get Involved! Citizen Science in Astronomy (Fri & Sat)
- Peering Deep with the James Webb Space Telescope (Fri & Sat)
- How the Universe is Trying to Kill Us (Fri & Sat)
-
Tune in for Today's #1 Black Hole Hits (Sat only)
Support AstroFest
We're running a short-term fundraiser now through Aug. 31, 2025. Your contribution can help sustain this inspiring program in several ways.
Outreach is at the core of the Eberly College of Science—it's part of Penn State's land-grant mission. We've run this free, public program for the past twenty-five years, and we want to keep it going for twenty-five more.
Your support will help us continue to offer this event for free to the public and create new, unique programming; purchase additional supplies; maintain our public-use telescopes; reach wider audiences; and, importantly, support our students. It takes a village to plan this yearly popular event. It was founded by students, and they remain a core driver.