Young Astronomer Wins Stellafane Youth Outreach Award

The organizers of Stellafane, the century-old amateur telescope makers convention held annually in Springfield, Vermont, awards prizes to the makers of eclectic telescopes that dot the field around the iconic pink clubhouse atop Breezy Hill during the event. Having just celebrated 100 years, this year the convention introduced a new award: the Raymond Fairbanks Youth Outreach Award. And it couldn’t have gone to a more deserving recipient.

Meet Kaitlynn Goulette

If you ask most anybody at Stellafane — or any star party, for that matter — when they became interested in astronomy, they’ll likely tell you that it was at a fairly young age, usually around 10 or 12 or so.

Not so for Kaitlynn Goulette, of Westfield, Massachusetts. Before she even started kindergarten, her mother would take her to the Springfield Science Museum — every day during the summer. Her favorite thing to do there was attend the planetarium shows. During those visits, Goulette learned about the Springfield STARS, the local astronomy club, and joined. She was so incredibly interested in astronomy that her parents bought her a telescope for her birthday.

That would be her sixth birthday.

This autumn, Goulette is about to enter her junior year at Westfield High School. When she started there, in ninth grade, she founded the school’s first astronomy club. But that wasn’t her first astronomy club — it was her third! She founded astronomy clubs at her elementary and middle schools, too. While she’s obviously currently active in her high school’s club, the clubs in her old elementary and middle schools are still thriving, with new members joining every year. Whenever one of the three clubs organizes an observing or other astronomy-related event, members from the other two join in and all ages participate and share their love for the night sky together.

We all remember how group activities largely ceased across the globe during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many astronomers persevered at their hobby, as it’s an activity one can pursue safely socially distanced in one’s own backyard. Goulette, then in sixth grade, wanted the members of her elementary school astronomy club to stay in touch, so she started writing and distributing a monthly newsletter, The Starry Scoop, in which she shared her knowledge and passion for the night sky.

She expected it to remain a small-scale publication that would circulate only within a small community. But it grew and grew and continues to grow. Even as the pandemic subsided and clubs regrouped to observe together again, Goulette said that “now I’ve grown it so much, I can’t imagine stopping it.” In spite of her busy schedule, Goulette still writes and distributes The Starry Scoop once a month. (She’s still in the process of developing her website, but you can already visit it, read back issues, and sign up to get The Starry Scoop in your inbox.)

Goulette has been going to Stellafane since 2015 with her family — her mother, father, and two sisters. She enjoys observing under the dark skies that Breezy Hill is known for, but she also takes people on a "solar system tour" during the day (an activity she also undertakes in her hometown of Westfield).  

Goulette finds ways to fill her daytime hours with astronomy, too. This summer, she’s come full circle and is working at the Springfield Museum’s planetarium, where she gives a live show of the night sky and a tour of the solar system and beyond. “Something cool about the planetarium is that we have the oldest, American-made operating ‘star ball’” in the world,” Goulette tells me. But it doesn’t stop there: “We also have a brand-new Zeiss projector — we’re able to tour the entire universe, it’s really cool, and I love using it.”

And the Award Goes To . . .

All of this is why the Stellafane organizers deemed Kaitlynn Goulette worthy of the Raymond Fairbanks Youth Outreach Award. The Award is named in honor of the youngest member of the original group of amateur telescope makers, who would meet and grind mirrors together, and eventually established the Stellafane Convention in the 1920s.

When I asked Goulette how she learned that she was the recipient, she told me it was a complete surprise. When she and her family showed up at Stellafane, Goulette said that “people were acting weird, and all the members of Stellafane were coming up and saying ‘hi’ to me.” She says that she knew who they were (after all, she’s been attending the Convention for eight years by now), but she couldn’t fathom how they knew who she was. She felt something was up. But her father (who had been forewarned) played it down.

Then, on the Saturday afternoon after the session talks at the Flanders Pavilion, the organizers introduced the award and explained what it was. At this point, Goulette still had no idea she’d be the focus of the award-giving. But when they called her name out all the pieces fell into place!

Carl Malikowski, Stellafane’s Outreach Coordinator, presented her with the award. “Stimulating interest in Astronomy and Telescope Making is our passion at Springfield Telescope Makers and our focus for our Outreach programs,” Malikowski says. “Recognizing youth who share this same passion and whose efforts are deemed exceptional by others in our astronomy community is what the Raymond Fairbanks Youth Outreach Award is all about. I cannot think of a more deserving person to be the first recipient of this Award.”

We can be sure that Goulette’s astronomy career is going to take her into the stratosphere. After high school she plans to study astrophysics, with a particular focus on science communication. The world sure could use more articulate, intelligent, passionate young ladies like Kaitlynn Goulette communicating important scientific knowledge to the public at large.

Join me in congratulating Kaitlynn Goulette on this marvelous achievement and wishing her the best of luck in her endeavors to come. Brava!

Read our celebration of the Stellafane Convention in the August 2023 issue of Sky & Telescope, by Dennis di Cicco.