Find Your Place at Arcadia.
Brittany Maxwell ’12
Taking the Night Skies of Pennsylvania first-year seminar gave me access to museums and other places geared toward astronomy that I otherwise would not have had. For one class, we learned all about the constellations and then went up on the roof of Boyer Hall to find them in the sky. I can still spot them three years later.
I was surprised by how much we were able to see from Arcadia’s observatory. We saw Mars, Jupiter and its moons, Saturn and even Orion’s Belt. It was also surprising that we were able to use a special program that assisted us in viewing the skies from a particular point in time to identify an astronomical object in one of Van Gogh’s paintings.
This class also filled part of the Arcadia Promise of integrative learning by taking us on numerous field trips during which we interacted and fully engaged with what we were learning. For our Philadelphia field trip, we went to the Franklin Institute. Being from Philly, I’ve been to the museum numerous times, but I’ve never had the opportunity to go on the roof of the museum and look through their telescope. It was an awesome experience.
