As the school year comes to a close, academic clubs are looking back on their successes from the year, particularly the Astronomy Club. This year was the club’s first in taking on projects involving club members and even the school as a whole. Headline astronomy projects for the 2023-2024 school year included the club’s involvement in NASA’s Plant the Moon challenge, as well as their solar eclipse observation event, which drew in hundreds of students in early April.

“Our proudest achievement from this year [was] probably the eclipse viewing…we were able to deal with so many different students and fortunately have no one burn their eyes out,” senior club leader Jack Chen said. “We set up a lot of displays, not all of them were used, but people were still interested in the pinholes and telescopes whenever we got them to work.”

As far as Plant the Moon went, for McLean’s Astronomy Club it was actually more like Plant Mars, as the club received a soil sample from Mars rather than lunar soil. However, the club found that it was still a good learning opportunity and was even able to submit their findings to an analysis competition.

“We did an experiment with the soil to see how lighting and the amount of more diverse soil would affect plant growth,” Chen said. “Everything ended up dying, but we did find that the stuff in the Mars soil survived for a surprisingly long time.”

Although the club has concluded their biggest projects for the year, they are using remaining meetings as an opportunity to explore unique and often less-addressed topics like theoretical space. This is in addition to housekeeping tasks like selecting and preparing the club leaders for next school year. No explicit goals have been set yet for the next academic year, but new leaders have already begun to propose and look into new field outings, one of which is planetariums.

Though the end of the year is often bittersweet for extracurriculars, especially for seniors, the Astronomy Club’s productivity this past year has left students like Chen feeling proud of their work and optimistic for their future astronomical endeavors. As we roll into the next school year, only time will tell how the astronomy club will develop McLean’s familiarity with our galaxy.

“It’s been a really fun time,” Chen said. “While we don’t have strict meetings, I’ve had a lot of fun learning about various [areas of] space, whether it’s how specifically the moon works or what’s in our solar system to ‘oh hey, there’s planets and solar systems out there that rain diamonds.’”