This is a free, in-person event hosted by Mirror Lake State Park on August 10, 2024 at 8:30 PM. The talk will be given at the park amphitheater. No registration is necessary. With questions, please call the park office at +1-608-254-2333.

Universe in the Park includes a RAIN OR SHINE presentation on astronomy, including recent astronomical news, and a weather-dependent star party, where visitors have the opportunity to view available astronomical objects through a telescope.

UitP is a program of the Department of Astronomy and UW Space Place.

Presenter Max Kroft is a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in the UW-Madison Astronomy Department. His research primarily involves observational studies of exoplanets, planets outside of our solar system. He currently works on detecting and characterizing the orbits of new exoplanets discovered with the TESS mission. He also is involved with studies of binary star systems out of the plane of our galaxy. In the future, he would like to work on more detailed characterizations of exoplanets, such as studying their atmospheres using spectroscopic data from JWST.

Presenter Loren Robinson is a first-year Graduate Student pursuing a Ph.D. in Astronomy at UW-Madison. He earned his BS in Astrophysics in 2023 at The Ohio State University. His research is focused on understanding Quasars: extremely luminous Black Holes at the center of galaxies. At present, he is examining Broad Absorption Line features of quasars using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Reverberation Mapping project. He is a part of the SDSS-V Collaboration and has an interest in applications of data analysis in the field of astronomy