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“Night at the Museum”

Tonight’s speaker at the Lyon County Historical Museum was Dr. DeWayne Backhus. He’s the chair of the Departments of Physical Sciences at Emporia State University.

He took us on a tour of the night sky, gave us an idea of what’s hanging up there in the dark this time of year and where to find it.

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Tourvelot’s “The Planet Jupiter”

Backhus brought along three incredible prints that are property of ESU. Here’s his paper about the prints, published in the Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science.

Etienne Leopold Tourvelot (1827-1895) was a French artist and amateur astronomer. He created these incredible pieces of art. ESU is lucky enough to have 10 prints. The art work is stunning.

And Tourvelot also accidentally introduced gypsy moths to America. (Oops.) His departure for France was about the same time the moth population exploded in Medford, MA.,where he had been living.

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On August 11 at 7 p.m., ESU’s Max McCoy will speak at “Night at the Museum” on the topic of meteorites.

2 Comments

  1. I remember the time I took my multi-age class to the planetarium at ESU and Dr. Backhus answered questions after the “show.” We loved the planetarium! He referred to my class as the “gifted” class from Neosho Rapids (that made me smile) but it was probably because they were different ages and they loved studying the solar system and they did ask intelligent questions. We made paper mache models of all the planets–even Pluto–and hung them from the ceiling at school. DeWayne is part of St. Marks AND I knew his parents and family from when I taught at Hope. –very nice family.

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