Stellar Dreams opens in Buffalo as The Science Haven gives telescopes to 27 students

Twenty-seven students walked a red carpet at Buffalo State University, and each went home with a telescope of their own. The evening launched Stellar Dreams, the telescope program of The Science Haven, the nonprofit led by Dr. Raven Baxter.

"Tonight we are celebrating you," Baxter told the students and their families in a Buffalo State lecture room. "It's called Stellar Dreams because we're going to be looking at these stars in the sky and the moon and the planets, but also because you are the stars."

The kickoff came during a busy season for space news. In January, Gov. Kathy Hochul's office said the April 8 total solar eclipse would cross Buffalo and parts of 29 counties. It would be the state's first total eclipse in nearly 100 years. Four days before the event, Intuitive Machines launched its Odysseus lander. It touched down on February 22, the first U.S. landing on the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, according to NASA.

Baxter, the Haven's executive director, turned to access in her opening remarks. "Our goal is to make science accessible to those populations that are traditionally missed by those traditional mainstream science initiatives," she said. "We want to make sure that everyone has a chance to be a scientist."

In an interview filmed by the university, Baxter described astronomy as a door into the other sciences. "Astronomy is the gateway to so many scientific fields, and it starts with that sense of exploration and curiosity," she said.

Her own path ran the same way. "I had a telescope when I was a kid; I wound up being a biologist. So many things happen when you give a child a telescope," she said in Buffalo State's preview of the event.

"Science is for everyone," she told WKBW. "All we do as scientists is ask questions. As long as you know how to be curious and explore, you can be a scientist."

Baxter earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in biological sciences at Buffalo State, in 2014 and 2017, and has worked in Buffalo Public Schools. She chose her hometown for the program's first group of students. "We have some kids who have never left Buffalo coming tonight, and for them to have the telescope to look at the moon and imagine they're off the planet is really cool," she told WKBW.

"I believe that if anything, a lot of these kids tonight will feel like they can do anything, and that the world isn't so big of a place, and that they can do great things," she said.

After the remarks, the students split into two groups, The Record, Buffalo State's student newspaper, reported. One group watched a planetarium show led by its director, Dr. Kevin Williams. The other learned to use telescopes from Buffalo Astronomical Association president Michael Humphrey and club members. Then the groups switched.

Each student then walked the red carpet to receive a telescope from Gamble. The students unboxed their telescopes and took them outside for a star party at nightfall. Each was a Celestron Travel Scope 80 with a phone mount for taking pictures, Space.com reported.

The planetarium has a long history of its own. The university opened its first planetarium in 1964. A fire destroyed it in 1978, and public donations, the largest from Whitworth Ferguson Sr. and his family, paid to rebuild it. It was renamed for him in 1982, according to Buffalo State. Today the Whitworth Ferguson Planetarium seats up to 48 under a 35-foot dome.

The Science Haven grew out of STEMbassy, a weekly livestream Baxter hosted with other scientists starting early in the COVID-19 pandemic. "The public was faced with this challenge of understanding science, of viruses and vaccines and human biology, really at a day's notice," she said. The Haven became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2023.

Hosting STEMbassy, Baxter realized that people need more chances to engage deeply with science every day. "A telescope is a science lab in your house," she says.

In May 2024, Stellar Dreams won a Gold Award in the first Astronaut Rock Star Awards, from uniphi space agency, according to the announcement.

Baxter, a molecular biologist, is the founder and president of The Science Haven. She is a two-time Buffalo State graduate, with degrees in biological sciences from 2014 and 2017, and earned her doctorate at the University at Buffalo.