July 26, 2018 8:00 pm

StarTalk Patron Creates New Telescope 101 Video Series; Has a Telescope Giveaway to Celebrate!

Today’s guest post is by Ron Sparkman. Ron is a science communicator, astronomy undergrad, and the founder of Stardom. He’s also the co-creator of I Love Mars, Senior Media Executive for Beyond Our Sight, co-hosts the Mars Society’s Red Planet Radio, and is an Advanced Academy graduate of Project PoSSUM. Ron is a StarTalk fan and Patreon Patron that has been to a half dozen events via the Patreon community. Find Ron on all social media platforms: @StardomSpace & @StardomSpaceRon.

What’s better than one free telescope? Six of them! (I’ll get to that in just a moment.)

My name is Ron Sparkman and I’m the founder of Stardom and an avid StarTalk Patron. Like many of you, I have been infinitely inspired by Cosmos and StarTalk, but I wasn’t entirely sure where to start once I’d been imbued with “The Cosmic Perspective.” So, a few years ago when I began to search for resources on amateur astronomy, the answers I found were kind of all over the place. Thus, I devised a plan to create a telescope/astronomy 101 series—once I had the knowledge to do so.

Fast forward a bit and I was fortunate enough to meet an amazing father/son duo at the Colorado Springs Astronomical Society, my local club. I had partnered with Key West Astronomy Club to give away a telescope and George and Erick volunteered as my hosts. The audience was so impressed by the team, Erick especially, that I knew I had found the hosts for my show. Through some connections at my local space science museum, the Space Foundation, I was introduced to a documentarian director, Isaac Frames. It took little convincing to get him onboard.

Our team was complete. It was time to get going.

With over a year of hard work and tirelessly working on getting our schedules to line up, we finally shot our series, Clear Skies, at the Space Foundation. Launched last week on the Stardom YouTube channel, the entire series is packed with information…and can be watched in just under one hour! Perfect for a weekend lesson for the starry-eyed kid in all of us.

To highlight the release of the series, fellow StarTalk Patron & MyRadar founder Andy Green has sponsored an impressive SIX Orion telescopes–of five varying styles for the winner to choose from–for Stardom to giveaway in collaboration with six other thriving young space science communicators & brands.

Joining in on the giveaway fun are aspiring Martian & Project PoSSUM candidate Alyssa Carson; Seeker, Futurism, & TMRO host AstroAthens; Author Bill Hargenrader’s I Love Mars; Kovi Rose’s Fun Fact Science, and Beyond Our Sight & Astronomus, both creations from Sebastian Leon.

The giveaways run through this coming weekend, so head to each of their page’s across Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram and search for the telescope collage photo like you see here for instructions on how to win!

And, of course, if you’re interested in just diving right into the series, you can check out the videos below! Make sure to find more information on upcoming seasons on Stardom’s Facebook or Instagram pages and the dedicated Clear Skies Twitter page.

Now, without further ado, the videos…

Episode 1:

Episode 2:

Episode 3:

Episode 4:

Episode 5: