Friday, June 12, 2026, 7 PM, location: Theater 300 in Memorial High School
MAS is proud to announce a new partnership with the MMSD Planetarium at Memorial High School in Madison!
The June 2026 meeting of the Madison Astronomical Society will be the first meeting in our new location.
The meeting will start in Theater 300 (directions and map below).
This kick-off event will focus on making everyone comfortable and excited for the new possibilities for both of our organizations under a partnership agreement.
We will tour the spaces at Vel Phillips Memorial HS where the MAS meetings will be held, experience some of the capabilities of the MMSD Planetarium as a learning/teaching, and visualization tool, and have an open conversation about all aspects of the partnership going forward.
Ben Senson is the Planetarium Director for the Madison Metropolitan School District. He has been an educator for more than 35 years as a classroom teacher of the Earth sciences, physics, aerospace engineering, and astronomy. At Madison College, he is a senior part-time instructor for physics and astronomy. His work has included numerous published activities in curriculum projects, including National Project WET and Project Lead the Way Aerospace Engineering. He is the lead author of “Aerospace Engineering: From the Ground Up” and its accompanying lab manual. His astronomy research has been conducted through the NITARP program and has focused on cataloging young stellar objects, identifying sources of erroneous Gaia measurements for the proper motion of active galactic nuclei, and cataloging highly variable active galactic nuclei as candidates for reverberation mapping. Ben was the designer and first director of the MMSD Observatory and is currently working on its newest edition to be developed in the MMSD school forest. In his spare time, Ben is creating a scale model of the UW Student Observatory (currently the Bell-Burnell Observatory) as it would have appeared when built in the 1880s.
Annie Wilcox Panzer is currently the astronomy teacher at Vel Phillips Memorial High School. She is in her fifteenth year of teaching and is a proud MMSD graduate. She has taught almost every science course you can name from seventh to twelfth grade, but prefers to dwell in the Earth sciences. In the summer, she teaches engineering courses with UW-Madison Badger Pre-College and consults on curriculum for other physical science courses. She has a strong passion for involving students in science and community activism. On the rare occasion she is not at school, she chases her three young children, ages 6, 4, and 1. She is eager to learn and grow with MAS.