Ever seen Sirius, the Dog Star? These Huskies could have found it for you.

The Astronomy Club began existence with a big bang on March 17, 1936. Thanks to the vision of its twenty founding members, the club quickly became known as “one of the most interesting” student groups, according to a March 1937 Northeastern News article.

But the committed cosmologists were forced to bootstrap. Star-struck members had to make their own Newtonian telescopes, AKA the poor man’s telescope, even down to grinding their own mirrors.

Besides studying constellations and gaining a general knowledge of the heavens, the amateur astronomers enjoyed visits to obser­vatories and other field trips. New York City’s Hayden Planetarium, which had opened in 1935, was an annual destination. In 1939, the club traveled to the New York World’s Fair, which featured a planetarium.

Eventually, Northeastern provided the group with solid footing by building an observatory platform on the Richards Hall roof, a stellar site with a complete view of the night sky.

Some club members engaged in a little moonlighting by teaching astronomical facts to the two hundred frosh enrolled in the Survey of Physical Science course.

By 1942, however, the Astronomy Club had changed its focus and was now called the Science Club. Perhaps the U.S. entrance into World War II caused students’ celestial interests to be eclipsed by more earthly preoccupations.

If so, the fault, as they say, lay not in their stars.

— Magdalena Hernandez, MBA'02