State of the Organization – January 2025

In our first board-led end-of-the-year fundraising appeal, we have raised more than $40,000 in gifts from our generous members, family, friends, and astronomy enthusiasts! A huge thanks to Preston Stahly, the creator of our fabulous Stellar Legacy Appeal, the board of directors and governance committee for their leadership gifts, and all of you who so generously invested in our future. Further, dozens of Bronx observatory donors—totaling over $25,000—authorized us to re-purpose these generous contributions to strengthen our membership services and public astronomy educational nonprofit mission. Thank you all!

Please join us for our winter social on January 23rd at 7 p.m. to celebrate a great year. Meet with old friends, make new ones, and show our appreciation for our members and volunteers who drive our association.

What’s New in the New Year?

We’ll have access to and use of two observatories for community stargazing in Spring 2025. First, we have developed our first partnership with a CUNY college, Queensborough Community College (QCC), where we’ll have access to their high-tech remote telescope and athletic fields for promoting astronomy to the Queens community, which doesn’t currently have a regular observing site. Second, we are now expanding our partnership with The Evergreens Cemetery, a historic cemetery and registered arboretum on 250 acres, which will be building an observatory on-site with our donated equipment, as well as their 190-person community learning center, granting us access to and use for community observing, AAA events, telescope clinics, workshops, Starfests, and more.

A huge thanks to Tom Haerberle and other observers for helping me, as Chair of the Board, establish both partnerships, suggest and facilitate this expanded partnership with The Evergreens Cemetery, and organize the first stargazing at QCC with 65 attendees. These are two great opportunities for us to expand our reach to more students and members of the public and inspire the next generation of stargazers!

Volunteers Needed

AAA is in need of dozens more observers to meet the demands for and invest in our future of public observing, outreach, and Starfests! Currently, our public observing program, run by Kat Troche and Rori Baldari, has less than a dozen regular dedicated, passionate observers, covering almost a dozen sites throughout NYC, often weekly, throughout the season, as well as Starfests, joined by some occasional observers. Cody Shakespeare and Willie Xu manage our public outreach to schools, regularly seeking observers to join them in promoting astronomy in our public schools.

Thus, to meet our important public service educational need—and because we heard you through Mauri Rosenthal’s survey say that if the club does more for observing, outreach, and Starfests, you’ll do more—we are planning telescope training where you can learn from our experts how to use your telescope, learn about the night sky, and learn how to become an AAA observer if you are interested in joining the ranks of our distinguished observers.  

Stay tuned for the details for winter and early spring training to prepare for the start of the stargazing season and hopefully throughout the year!  Come join us, either by teaching or learning the night sky and how to use your telescope, build your Astro community, or consider joining the ranks of our observers.  To assist the board with this important initiative, we welcome our newest board director and our board liaison for observer education, Willie Xu, who will be working alongside Rori Baldari and Kat Troche, and Dave in classes.

Lastly, we appreciate that there can be a personal cost to attend observing sessions and outreach with congestion pricing coming and increased tolls. Thus, to enable this key public service program to thrive, the board has created a restricted fund to help defray the costs of transportation for observers attending public observing with their telescopes. 

New Vice President of Operations

AAA has changed our operations guard! As we give a huge collective thanks to Kat, our superb outgoing VP of Operations, we extend a very warm welcome and thank you to Jen Sipila for stepping up to this critical role!

Bryanne Hamill
Chairwoman of the Board