The University of Central Arkansas Society of Physics Students (SPS) hosted its annual Star-Be-Que on Wednesday, November, 12 from 6 p.m to 8 p.m.

The event featured a cookout and stargazing in front of the Lewis Science Center. 

The SPS brought out UCA’s radio telescope and gave those that attended the event a chance to see it in action. 

Senior Blayne Griffin is the research student that was in charge of running the radio telescope at the event. 

Griffin said, “[The telescope] is a 2.3 meter dish. It is tuned to 1420 megahertz, which detects hydrogen. Tonight we’re trying to observe Casiopeia A, which is very loud in hydrogen.”

Griffin said that this event was the first time that he has done mapping on this telescope, and he was doing it in front of a crowd. 

According to the treasurer of SPS, senior August Childress, this year’s event had a bigger turn out than he had seen in the past few years. 

Childress said, “We usually have a pretty hard time getting people to turn out, but this is, I think, our biggest event so far.”

SPS uses this event to create a sense of community, and what better way to do that than with food? Star-Be-Que featured a hot dog cookout. 

Childress said, “Food is always a good way to connect people to an event , or people to an idea, so if you can get people out and feed them they’ll listen to you a little more, they’ll learn more.”

Griffin said, “Star-Be-Que is more about food,” though. 

Griffin said, “It was created to bring people closer together, especially around stars, and just space in general. Whenever you stargaze, all of your human problems kind of fade away.” 

Childress said, “We really decided to do this event so we can bring people in, make them excited about physics, and the best way to do that is the telescopes, you know. Get them to look at interesting things in the sky.”

Griffin and Childress said that they enjoyed hosting the event. 

Childress said, “It’s always a pleasure to bring these telescopes out and get to work with them, get to show people the stars.”

Griffin said, “We have this tiny Dobsonian [telescope] here that people can manually use, we have the radio telescope, we have the optical observatory. There’s so much space at UCA, and we want to share it.”

Childress reflected on his first experience at Star-Be-Que in his freshman year. 

Childress said, “[Something that I learned at my first Star-Be-Que] would have to be how interesting the stars actually are. Not necessarily just the stars, but the planets as well. You can look at it in a book and… it’s just a picture, but when you actually see it with your own eyes it’s pretty cool.”

SPS is looking for more members to join and are searching to teach new students how to work with their telescopes. 

Griffin said, “We’re currently trying to train some freshmen how to use it. So if people want to get involved, we are very eager to get them trained up before [the seniors] end up graduating.”

Griffin said that students interested in joining SPS should contact Dr. Lusk or any of the astronomy and physics professors.