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Kalamazoo Valley Museum hosts conference on planetariums

Skywatchers in China gather at Beijing Planetarium to watch a super blue blood moon eclipse with telescopes.
Skywatchers in China gather at Beijing Planetarium to watch a super blue blood moon eclipse with telescopes.

The Kalamazoo Valley Museum is hosting a conference on Wednesday through Saturday, on planetariums.

Teachers, researchers and vendors will converge on Kalamazoo for the conference, organized by the Great Lakes Planetarium Association. Workshop topics range from what’s new in planetarium shows for children…to astronomers’ role in climate change education. Grant Harkness is with the Iowa-based educational nonprofit the Organization for the Proliferation of Space Studies. He’ll talk about piquing students’ interest in space with meteorites, which Harkness slices up for them.

You’re taking it right off of a saw and you’re holding a piece of outer space and you’re looking at it, it makes it so much more engaging.

Harkness says he recently returned from Jordan, where he helped repatriate a fragment of a meteorite removed from the country.

Sehvilla Mann joined WMUK’s news team in 2014 as a reporter on the local government and education beats. She covered those topics and more in eight years of reporting for the Station, before becoming news director in 2022.