On the first and third Friday of each month from April to November, the physics department at Colorado State University opens the Madison-Macdonald Observatory to the public and hosts a night of public observing. 

Professor Emily Hardegree-Ullman runs the events with one of the student telescope operators within the department. 

“I’ve always been into space and planets, but I actually didn’t get an opportunity to look through many telescopes until I was in college,” Hardegree-Ullman said. “So now that I use them a lot, I really like showing other people how to use them.”

The Madison-Macdonald Observatory was originally built in 1965 and was the work of M. Leslie “Les” Madison, the chairman of the mathematics department and the astronomy professor on campus. 

When the observatory was first built, the location was an excellent site for observing due to the dark skies overhead, and it was used in astronomical research through the 1960s. 

Today, the light pollution from the growing city and campus prevents any research from being done at the observatory, but the telescopes continue to be used for the scientific purpose of educating students at CSU and giving the general public a chance to see into the sky above.

“We can see a lot of the fairly bright things, even if they’re too faint for your eye,” Hardegree-Ullman said. “With the big telescope, you can see the Ring Nebula pretty well; you can see globular clusters where you can see the individual stars; you can see Andromeda Galaxy. So there’s a lot of cool things you can see.”

Hardegree-Ullman is currently the only professor of astronomy at CSU. She runs the observatory alongside two student telescope operators.

“It’s the best part of my job,” Hardegree-Ullman said. “People will look at something like Saturn and say, ‘That can’t be real — that has to be fake.’ So it’s just pretty neat to be able to show people that these things we talk about are actually out there.”

The planets that can be seen from the observatory vary throughout the year. Currently, Saturn, Jupiter and Neptune can be seen through the telescopes alongside the moon and countless stars out in the universe.

“I really like how every time I’ve worked, no matter what people’s majors are, what people’s backgrounds are, they come here, and they always have the same reaction on their face,” said Stefania Miranda, a second-year physics major and one of the telescope operators at the observatory. “Every time they look into the lens, they’re always like, ‘This is so cool,’ or, ‘No way,’ or ‘That looks fake,’ and I say the same things, and it just never gets old.”

The observatory will host two more public observing nights Nov. 3 and 17 before closing down for the winter. The events will start up again on the first Friday of April as long as the skies are clear. 

“There’s very few places where you can use a telescope this big for free, so if you’re in Fort Collins, you should definitely come,” Hardegree-Ullman said.

Reach Hannah Parcells at science@collegian.com or on Twitter @HannahParcells.