Since the discovery of the first exoplanets in the early 1990s, we have detected more than 4,000 worlds beyond our solar system. Many of these are similar in size to our Earth, leading to an obvious question: could any be habitable? For now, we typically only know the size and orbit of these planets, but nothing about their surface conditions. Although we cannot know for sure if these worlds could support life, we can use models to speculate on what we might find there.

Join us for the November AstroTour! Victor Chan, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, will be sharing his expertise on cosmology!

Speaker: Randy Attwood, FRASC, Mississauga Centre

HAA welcomes Trevor Jones as our guest speaker for our first meeting at McMaster Innovation Park, our new home.

Watch the recorded video: https://youtu.be/dVJps1bgkdo

This Fall and Winter, spend a Sunday afternoon in the OTHER dome at the DDO! Join us in the Starlab Digital Planetarium and take an interactive journey through the Universe, led by a DDO astronomer. Tour the night sky and see close-up views of galaxies, nebulas, and star clusters, view our Solar System's Planets and alien exo-planets, land on the moon, Mars - and the Sun, travel home to Earth from the edge of the Universe, hear Indigenous starlore, and watch immersive fulldome movies!

Explore the night sky through an engaging and informative presentation delivered by an astronomer. Delve into the history and mythology of the heavens, and learn how to identify the constellations. This is a family-friendly event. Please dress for the weather.

Exploring the Earth's Interior by Full Seismic WavesQinya Liu, J. Tuzo Wilson Professor of Geophysics, University of Toronto

Explore the night sky through an engaging and informative presentation delivered by an astronomer. Delve into the history and mythology of the heavens, and learn how to identify the constellations. This is a family-friendly event. Please dress for the weather.

NASA’s latest Mars mission touched down roughly a year ago. Tasked with detecting even the slightest tremor in the planet’s crust, tracking its weather 24.5 hours a day, and sensing its internal temperature, InSight is allowing us to explore Mars like never before. Let’s take a look at what InSight has shown us so far, and what it could reveal to us about our second favourite terrestrial planet.