by Rojas Oliva, entertainment editor

Astronomy Club’s meetings every other Wednesday, in Astronomy Club sponsor Samuel Childers’s room, plan on appealing to anyone who’s ever looked up at the sky.

“Anyone who’s looked up and wondered what it is, which is most everyone at some point or another,” Childers said.

This lofty goal is being carried out by Astronomy Club leaders junior co-presidents Karna Venkatraj and Savannah Troy and vice-president Sydney Garret.

“[Karna and I] both had the idea at the same time, which was really weird,” Troy said. “I was like ‘Oh my gosh, I’m going to start an astronomy club,’ and he was like ‘No, I want to start an astronomy club,’ and so instead of fighting about it we decided to be co-presidents.”

The idea emerged from their disappointment at the ending of a potential astronomy class Childers had attempted to kickstart. So, Troy and Venkatraj asked Childers to be the club’s sponsor.

“[The club] kind of rose from the ashes of the class,” Childers said.

Similar to the would-be class, the astronomy club will focus on learning the fundamentals of astronomy. To achieve this, they plan on revolving their meetings around  small lectures on astronomy, developments in the astronomy community and maybe even some Cosmos viewing parties.

“What an astronomy club does is a lot of observation,” Childers said. “But it’s also a lot of learning about what it is you’re looking at.”

This is where the freedom of an after-school club provides an advantage, since a class would be limited in the opportunities for observation. Therefore, the club plans on having stargazing parties once a month using a telescope provided by the school, and are currently working on developing a relationship with the observatory at Texas A&M in order to take trips to their facilities.

However, they’re still in the “experimental” stage of developing a curriculum.

“We’re very limited this year,” Childers said. “We have only got a couple of meetings until the end of the year so [we are] just trying to get everything laid out [and deciding] what we want to do next year.”

So far the club has faced issues in scheduling and having to meet only once every two weeks to avoid conflicting with larger clubs, but their largest fear is the potential for the club to appeal only to a small minority of students.

“It sounds really nerdy,” Venkatraj said. “[So] the biggest challenge for this club is going to be how we attract people to something that seems very abstract and not important.”

However, the wonder of looking up might prove to be the attraction the club needs.

“The aesthetics of space are beautiful,” Venkatraj said. “And astronomy itself is so wondrous and has such magnitude that I think it’s a really cool subject to learn about.”

For Venkatraj, astronomy also has a more personal appeal.

“When I was growing up in New York, my parents would take us out to the countryside and tell us about the big dipper and stuff so for me astronomy has always been ingrained in my childhood,” Venkatraj said. “My parents wanted us to have a sense of scientific discovery. So in my mind, astronomy is a childhood.”

Troy has similar personal ties with the subject.

“For a long time I wanted to do cosmology and physics and stuff like that,” Troy said. “I’m kind of moving away from that now, but I still really like it, and it’s fun to have as a hobby.”

They hope to capitalize on this shared passion to create a truly unique club outside of just their topic.

“I think it has the potential to be a fun community of pretty good friends,” Troy said. “So far all our members are people I know, so we’re hoping to expand that.”

Beyond developing that community, their goal for every meeting is pretty big:

“I want [our members] to gain a bigger knowledge of what’s going on in the universe,” Venkatraj said.

And all they ask for in return is attendance.

“Come to astronomy club,” Garrett said. “It’s going to be great.”