As fireflies illuminated Pollock Road, a different type of light attracted a crowd of onlookers.

Hot flames shot out of a long tube, as songs played on a loudspeaker. Children splashed around in a tiny plastic pool of cornstarch and water.

This is all part of AstroFest, a festival dedicated to everything related to astronomy and science.

The main purpose is to get members of the public more interested in astronomy and to share our enthusiasm about it with them, said Jane Charlton, a professor teaching Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Volunteers from the Astronomy department, students and faculty all gathered to run various booths and games for children, students and residents of State College to enjoy.

Some activities outside Davey Laboratory included the Rubens Tube Dancing, launching of bottle rockets and astronomy-themed tie dye sessions.

A table located at the entrance was covered in AstroFest t-shirts and posters that volunteers were selling, with all of the proceeds going toward the Undergraduate Astronomy Club.

Other booths contained various experiments and activities.

Henry Gebhardt, a volunteer at one of the booths, explained that a Rubens Tube with holes poked in it, would be ignited with flames when propane flowed through it.

The flames will get larger if the pressure of the propane was higher, Gebhardt (graduateastro and astrophysics) said.

To further demonstrate, he asked curious onlookers to request songs that the flames would then mimic as the song progressed.

If you hit the right frequencies then you will get a resonance, Gebhardt said. The sound waves will travel through the tube and reflect it on the other side.

To motivate children to continue learning about astronomy at each booth, volunteers passed out pamphlets that booth leaders could stamp as each kid traveled through.

A prize table located in the front of the lobby had an assortment of scattered, colorful prizes that children could choose from if they collected enough stamps.

Kids under six years-old would need to collect five stamps, and kids over the age of six would need to collect eight stamps and watch a 30 minute presentation.

Charlton said there have been multiple students who attended AstroFest as children, and are now majoring in astronomy at Penn State.

Thats kind of exciting, she said. Anything that we can do to get [kids] interested now, is going to help getting them into these fields that are so important for our Country and the world.

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Activities, science experiments light up the first night of AstroFest - The Daily Collegian Online