Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) is holding a public viewing event this coming weekend to celebrate the 45-year anniversary of its Rogers Observatory campus. The event will be held from 6-10pm on Saturday, October 17 and is part of the college’s broader 75th anniversary festivities. According to a press release, the observatory dome “will be open and telescopes available” during the event.

Rogers Observatory is located at 1753 Birmley Road, near the Keystone Soccer Complex. The facility opened in 1981 and is named in honor of late NMC instructor Joseph H. Rogers. According to the press release, Rogers worked “tirelessly” to find a permanent home for “what had been NMC’s ‘portable’ telescope.”

A pair of local property owners each donated 2.5 acres for the facility, providing a space “on land with a 250-foot elevation above the surrounding property” where NMC could build an observatory. In addition to the land donations, the construction of the observatory was also paid for entirely by donations, with 40-plus businesses and 106 individuals pitching in “money, materials, and labor” to bring the facility to fruition.

According to NMC, more than 100,000 community members have visited the Rogers Observatory in the four and a half decades since. In addition to regular public viewing nights, the observatory has also hosted groups for “special celestial events” over the years, such as in 1996 when two comets – Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake – made their closest approaches to Earth.

The largest event in the observatory’s history, per the college? August 2003, “when Mars made its closest approach to Earth in more than 50,000 years.”