The St. Thomas observatory held its last public viewing of the semester, featuring a speech on black holes from physics and astronomy professor Elizabeth Wehner, for 30 students and community members on Wednesday.

According to Wehner, the goals of these speeches and observatory viewings are to help St. Thomas students and community members learn more about science and encourage active involvement.

“The public nights are kind of just a chance for people of all ages to come together, learn a little something, see something if the weather’s good and enjoy themselves,” Wehner said. “I hope that people will develop an excitement – or find an excitement in science and see the fun in it and learn something along the way.”

The subject of black holes is what drove freshman Barnes Murphy and his friends to attend the event on Wednesday.

“We all really like black holes already,” Murphy said. “It was just on a topic that we find interesting.”

Murphy’s favorite part of the presentation was learning about accretion disks, which are disks of material that orbit around central bodies in space, such as black holes. The accretion disks are drawn in to black holes by gravity and radiate energy as they orbit.

“It’s pretty cool that I learned finally why it’s actually a disk,” Murphy said. “I’ve always wondered why it wasn’t a sphere instead.”

After the black holes talk, attendees got a chance to see the St. Thomas observatory and watch as Wehner took pictures of the moon and stars with the telescope. Being able to actively take pictures of space is what drew freshman Anne Kopas to the event.

“It was really cool because it makes it more real to do it yourself,” Kopas said. “The pictures were taken right now, not some other time.”

Wehner said the weather usually impacts how many people come to the public viewings.

“Tonight was a clear night, and it was packed,” Wehner said. “Sometimes when it’s cloudy, we have lower attendance. We typically do find that people still come out for the talk, just not quite in the large numbers that they do on a clear night.”

Although the observatory closed its doors to the public for the rest of the semester, Wehner hopes to see the program continue to grow in the future because she enjoys sharing her passion for science.

“I really love sharing the night sky with people. I think people bring a lot of curiosity to this type of topic,” Wehner said. “Most people don’t get a chance to interact with astronomy or the bigger picture of where we are in the universe, and so it’s neat to be able to engage in that with people and answer their questions and explain it to them – to engage in that wonder myself all over again.”

Theresa Bourke can be reached at bour5445@stthomas.edu.