Help Ft Bend Astronomy Club's astronomy outreach

Please help the Fort Bend Astronomy Club (FBAC), near Houston, TX, continue in our astronomy outreach work at the George Observatory, located south of Houston. In the past 30 years we've introduced over 200,000 people, including over 40,000 children, to the wonders of the sky and other aspects of science. We need your help to enable us to perform our outreach work for the next 30+ years. Any assistance that you can provide will be greatly appreciated. Grains of sand add up to form a mountain!

Who we are

FBAC is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and a 509(a)(2) public charity. Our mission is Observing, Sharing, Teaching, and Promoting Astronomy. Most of our members live on the southwest and west sides of the Houston, TX, metropolitan area, with many living in Fort Bend County.

Some of what we do

For over 30 years, FBAC member-volunteers have performed public astronomy and related science outreach at the Houston Museum of Natural Science's George Observatory. We've done this work using our club-owned 18-in.-aperture reflector telescope. This is housed in the observatory's East Dome, the construction of which FBAC funded in the early 1990's. We've used the telescope to discover over 300 asteroids and to introduce over 200,000 people, including over 40,000 children, to the wonders of the sky and other aspects of science.

Here is the current equipment, in the East Dome.

Although this is not the subject of this fundraising request, we also send teams of member-volunteers to Houston-area schools, to teach astronomy to students, parents, and teachers. We provide lectures and presentations, and we also bring out our own telescopes to provide the audience with opportunities to see objects such as the Moon, the Sun (with proper filters!), the planets, and select stars. In many cases, this is the first time the attendees have ever looked through a telescope. There is a lot of joy in seeing a boy or girl shed tears of happiness upon seeing Saturn with his or her own eyes, for the first time! Feel free to read more about these Astronomy on Wheels (AOW) events at the provided link.

Between our work at the George Observatory and our AOW events, our member-volunteers collectively invest well over 1000 hours a year in public astronomy outreach.

Here is why we need your help

Our ability to continue our astronomy outreach work at the George Observatory beyond the next few years is uncertain. Our 18-in. telescope, which is the key to our efforts at the observatory, is over 30 years old. The telescope is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain. Further, we need to continually improve the experience we deliver to the members of our public audience. We believe that addressing these issues requires us to move to new equipment. There is no reasonable way we can improve equipment maintainability and significantly improve the public's experiences by continuing to use our current equipment.

We are helping ourselves, but we need your help, too

The club is working to address this problem. We've started a project, called the New East Dome Main Telescope and Mount Project, to replace the current telescope and mount with a commercially-sourced, maintainable telescope and mount of similar size and superior capabilities to our current equipment. In late 2022, a team of FBAC experts defined the following as being the type of equipment we are targeting:

Once we have the new telescope and mount, we will be able to perform our public outreach work at the George Observatory for many more years.

The project has a $51,000 budget. So far, we've raised about $22,200 from club member donations, employer matching, and from selling other club assets. We will continue to raise funds via internal sources. However, we need the support of caring people, such as you, to ensure we can acquire the necessary funds within the next one to two years.

Please do the following two things...

If you believe that our igniting imaginations via astronomy outreach at Houston's George Observatory is a worthwhile cause, we ask that you do the following two things.

Together, we can enable great things to happen!

FBAC thanks you for your support!

Thank you for your help! Note that your donations benefit FBAC, and not the Houston Museum of Natural Science. We are not affiliated with the Museum, but we have a long-standing agreement with the Museum that enables us to house our larger equipment, such as the club's current 18-in. telescope, within the George Observatory's East Dome.

In case you can't contribute via PayPal or credit card...

This GoFundMe website enables you to donate to our cause using either PayPal or a credit card. If neither of these works for you, you still can contribute via check. Go to the East Fund Donations page on our website to learn how to contribute using these approaches.

One final thing - more information regarding our project!

If you want some additional information regarding our project, feel free to download a presentation we've created that describes our need and how we are addressing it. You can find the presentation here.