The Telescopes for Teachers Program with Dr. Rachel Huchmala

Kimberly Mitchell, CSWA blogger, interviewed Dr. Rachel Huchmala, CSWA member and doctoral research fellow for Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve STEM Network (CIDSRSN). They spoke about the Telescopes for Teachers program Rachel helped found with CIDSRSN. 

*This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

"Huchmala_Whirpool" taken by Dr. Rachel Huchmala using the "enhanced vision" mode on one of the telescopes on the Boise State Campus (ie with light pollution). 
Photo Credit: Rachel Huchmala

Kimberly: Tell me about the Telescopes for Teachers program. What is it, and how did you get involved?

Rachel: Telescopes for teachers is a program that I started here in Boise, Idaho, as part of a NASA Science activation grant that we have. This program has allowed us to purchase 50 robotic telescopes. They're the Unistellar eQuinox 2s. They're super easy to use. They're also very compact and out of the box. In ten to fifteen minutes, you can have your telescope up and running. So with these fifty telescopes, we then got fifty teachers across the whole state of Idaho, not just Boise involved, trained on the telescope, and now the telescope is on long term loan to their school, and so they have this resource to use in their classroom to support any Earth and space science that they're doing.

Kimberly: Okay, that's really cool. So how did you come up with the idea, “Hey, let's put some telescopes and some teachers together and see what happens?”

Rachel: Our science activation program is called the Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve Stem Network. Our original outreach group was a group of undergraduate students that would go for classroom visits. However, using undergraduate students for these outreach events is really beneficial for a lot of reasons, but one of the big cons to it is that they are undergraduate students, most of the time physics students, which means they have quite rigorous course schedules. And so what we found was that a lot of our events ended up being stem nights, which is still good, right? But this then introduced the idea that if we're not doing classroom visits, if we're coming to the school at night, what's maybe a more exciting astronomy thing that we could do?  Through those kinds of conversations and meeting some of the teachers that had invited us to those STEM nights, we learned that one of the big disconnects in students really engaging in astronomy is that they can't touch it. It's not a tangible thing. 

So for us, it was like, what if we gave them telescopes? And so we had this idea, and in talking with collaborators and other people, we decided to make it kind of big and open to see how in this first year things went, so we knew how best to cater this program to what the teachers need. Because I think one thing that's been really important to me through this whole kind of creation process is that we're not telling them what to do, we're giving them a resource, teaching them how to use it, and then allowing the teachers to decide how to best use it in their classroom. 

And because we've taken this approach, that's also allowed us to involve teachers from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade. So we got this nice variety of teachers and the subjects they teach, how long they've been teaching, and the schools that they teach at. We have some urban teachers, mostly rural teachers, so we have people all over the place, and what it's allowed us to do is to learn ways that we can better support Earth and Space Science learning in the classroom, instead of forcing an idea on these already just oversubscribed, busy teachers. 

Kimberly: When did you receive the telescopes, and how did you decide who got a telescope?

Rachel: September 2023 we received notice that our grant was getting that extra allocation to purchase the telescopes. We ordered them in January of 2024, and they arrived in March of '24. We gave out our first ones in May, and our 49th and 50th telescope went out probably last September.

Kimberly: How did you choose teachers? Was that hard?

Rachel: It was really hard. There was kind of the idea that we had put forward something that probably wasn't going to work. I don't know why, call it imposter syndrome, or whatever you like. It was not entirely positive that this was going to get funded, and so when it did, we immediately had a bunch of issues kind of come to fruition that we didn't think through, because there was no point in stressing out about something that wasn't happening yet. In hindsight, maybe a little more planning on the front end (would have been good). But what we ended up doing was we were featured in a local news article that very quickly spread around the Treasure Valley. We put together a Google Form for teachers to express their interest. We had a couple of teachers that we knew, so we reached out to them first, and then this article came out, and pretty much overnight, we had 100 people fill out the form requesting telescopes. 

It was very rewarding to see an immediate response, like we're doing something that is needed and that our community is interested in. But then we were immediately oversubscribed. So we put together this ad hoc rubric. It grew as we went, but we started first by looking at the locations of the schools, so teachers that were outside of our immediate area, schools that would be a lot harder for us to serve with the outreach programs that we already had in place. Those teachers moved towards the top of the list just because we knew that was a way that we could still reach those communities, especially if we couldn't send our students out there. So our furthest teacher is about eight hours north of us here in Boise, all the way up in Coeur d'Alene, and then our second furthest teacher is about four and a half hours east.

Dr. Huchmala with all fifty telescopes in the Telescopes for Teachers Program.
Credit: Rachel Huchmala

Kimberly: How did you train those teachers?

Rachel: So we learned that the big disadvantage to these telescopes is that their batteries are internal and they're too large to go on a plane. This summer, with one of our undergraduate outreach students as my volunteer assistant, we packed up the Boise State motor pool van and we drove and we ended up holding ten workshops over the summer, each one about four and a half hours of classroom training and two hours of stargazing, if weather allowed, where we went over the basics of the telescope. These are the parts, and this is what the buttons do. How does this telescope compare to other telescopes? One of the really interesting things about these unistellar telescopes is that the model we have doesn't have an eyepiece. They're cameras. You're still getting a live image, but it's not like you walk up to the telescope and look through the eyepiece that a lot of people are more used to. However, this does make them much nicer to use in classrooms, especially with younger students, because you don't have to worry about students climbing up ladders or standing very still to look through the eyepiece. And they're more accessible because nobody has to climb up a ladder or be a certain height to see through it. We can just pass around the tablet, so in the end, it works out, and this also allows them to have really nice light pollution filtering. So even our teachers in our more urban areas have the capability to see the deep sky objects that our teachers in the darker areas are able to see. 

Kimberly: Have you heard back from teachers yet on what they've been able to do with their classes?

Rachel: A little bit. So it's very cold here in Boise right now. I think the high today is 24 degrees Fahrenheit. We have a few teachers that were already into astro photography before they started. Some of them really hit the ground running over the summer. The rest of them, I suspect, in the next couple of months, will start kind of hosting their first events, pulling them out at STEM nights. But we have a couple teachers that have just taken some incredible images with these unistellar telescopes. We have a couple teachers that have already contributed to citizen science campaigns that Unistellar runs. So that was another interesting way that we were able to get them involved is to provide this kind of new and exciting thing. I was recently granted a citizen science seed funding program grant, and what we're going to do is work to turn this Telescopes for Teachers program into a citizen science project specifically geared towards these teachers and their students.

Kimberly: And you’re naming your telescopes after women in astronomy and physics, right? Can you tell me about that decision process and who you chose? You don't have to name all fifty.

Rachel: I honestly don't think I could if I tried, but we wanted to bring something kind of fun into this aspect of the Telescopes for Teachers Program. And for me, it's always been important to learn about women, especially in physics and astronomy, because they're not always the ones that are front page in the textbook. What we ended up doing was deciding to give the telescopes a name so that we were able to track them better.  That led to the decision to name them all after historical women in physics and astronomy, which created very fun history book report kind of project for me and some of the students, combing through Wikipedia pages and the women in astronomy blog, resources like that. We had a couple of criteria. The main one was that we couldn't name one of our telescopes after a telescope that had already been named. So we don't have a Nancy Grace Roman, that's kind of the big one, and we chose all historical women. These are all women who have already passed away, but that made impacts to science that not only furthered our scientific knowledge, but also helped to break down barriers and make it easier for people like myself and the next generation of female scientists to have this opportunity to even be a scientist, in some cases.

Kimberly: Do you remember some of your favorite names that you used? 

Rachel: Yes. My favorite is probably the oldest one. Her name is Seondeok. She was a Korean queen, and when she became queen, she built an observatory in Korea. It's the first one. And basically her whole life, men were telling her that she couldn't study astronomy because she was a woman, and so when it became her turn to come into power, she said, “I'm going to build this observatory, and I'm going to do what I want.” That one is one of my favorites. One really interesting one that I learned about was Judith Love Cohen (aerospace engineer, Apollo Space Program). She's a little bit more modern, but she is also Jack Black's mom. I was listening to an interview with Jack Black, and he was talking about his mom, and I was like, “Wait a second!” So searching for these women kind of took over my life for a bit of time, but it was interesting, all the seemingly random places we found inspiration for doing this. 

Kimberly: You could almost do a book about it, the fifty telescopes you’ve named. Is there a place where that information is centralized? 

Rachel: On our website, we have a page called Meet the Scientists, and that's where all fifty of the women our telescopes are named after are listed. There's a PDF link to each of them with our little synopsis biography. 

Kimberly: Do you have any plans for possibly doing a second round? 

Rachel: We are working on a renewal proposal for our NASA Science Activation Grant for continued support and growth of the Telescopes for Teachers and other outreach programs here at Boise State University.

Kimberly: Very cool. Is there anything else you want people on the astronomy blog to know about what you guys are doing? 

Rachel: We send around a monthly newsletter to all of our teachers. We spotlight one of the astronomers and updates about events that we're doing on the Boise State campus and things to look at if you're new to stargazing. 

Kimberly: Thank you so much, Rachel.

Rachel: Thank you.

Find out more about the Telescopes for Teachers program from Boise State University and the Central Idaho Dark Sky Reserve STEM Network. 

"Telescopes On Deck" is an image of four of the Unistellar eQuinox2 telescopes set up on the Boise State University Observatory deck during a training session.
Photo Credit: Rachel Huchmala