The Five Moons of Pluto

Dr. Suzanne Metlay

Is the subject of this month’s Estes Valley Astronomical Society (EVAS) meeting.   EVAS in conjunction with The Estes Park Memorial Observatory is offering a free public open house/star night on Saturday, August 27, 2016.  The goal of EVAS is to promote amateur astronomy and education in the Estes valley

Our speaker for this public star night will be Dr Suzanne Metlay from Western Governors University.  Her talk will be about the “Five Moons of Pluto”.  Charon and the other moons of Pluto have been revealed by the New Horizons spacecraft to be fascinating worlds. Using the latest imagery from NASA, let’s explore the dark deposits of Mordor near Charon’s North Pole, and then take a look at the red crater on Nix. Styx and Kerberos have their own surprises too!

Pluto’s Five Moons

Investigate the family of objects orbiting our solar system’s first known dwarf planet as professional geoscientists struggle to explain what we see and why it’s there. Let’s celebrate the success of the New Horizons mission as this well-engineered marvel continues on to its next encounter in the Kuiper Belt and let’s reflect on what we may yet learn.

Suzanne Metlay is full-time faculty in Geoscience Teacher Education at Western Governors University, a fully online non-profit university founded in 1997 by 19 governors of western states, including Colorado. Previously, Suzanne taught astronomy and geology at Front Range Community College in Longmont and Fort Collins, was Operations Director for Secure World Foundation in Superior, and served as Education Programs Manager at CU- Boulder’s Fiske Planetarium.

Suzanne has a BA in History and Science from Harvard University and a PhD in Geology and Planetary Science from the University of Pittsburgh. She was awarded the Antarctica Service Medal from the Department of the Navy and National Science Foundation for fieldwork conducted as a participant in the Antarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) in 1991.

The observatory is just north of the high school at 1600 Manford Ave. Park in the teacher’s parking lot between the high school and the observatory. The doors will open at 7:00 pm and the meeting will start at 7:30 pm.  The presentation, including a question and answer period, lasts about an hour. After the presentation, weather permitting, we will look through our new 16 inch dome telescope at various celestial objects.