Pranvera (Pran) Hyseni stood behind a golden telescope as a line of wide-eyed students stretched across the playground, craning to catch a glimpse of explosions on the surface of the sun. Between coordinating school visits and ensuring telescopes are calibrated for students, one mission keeps her focused: bring space to students through her new outreach program, Astronomy with Pran.
“My main goal is to bring interactive science to schools,” said Hyseni, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. “The biggest obstacle is that not all schools can make this happen because there are few resources. Not every school has telescopes.”
Through her program, Hyseni visits Bay Area and Santa Cruz K-12 schools to lead hands-on astronomy lessons that transform classrooms into miniature observatories. Students handle meteorites and peer through high-resolution solar telescopes to watch real-time solar explosions. The experience, she says, gives students the chance to feel like scientists.
Teachers say the impact is immediate.
“The astronomy program was a great way to launch our current reading unit, Researching the Universe, and one of our science units, Patterns in the Sky,” said Arlene Bautista, a teacher in the Los Altos School District who recently hosted the program. “Students were very engaged during the lesson and were excited to see the samples Pran brought. Reading about the sun is very different and far more meaningful after students were able to view it through the telescope.”
Despite the logistical demands of driving to sites, calibrating equipment and balancing a busy graduate student schedule, Hyseni manages and funds the program entirely on her own, making it free for every school that participates.
The idea traces back to her childhood in Kosovo, a country in Southeastern Europe where astronomy was virtually unknown. When she was 3, her grandfather filled a bucket with water so she could safely watch a solar eclipse glide across the surface. The eclipse, so unfamiliar that schools were closed across the country, sparked a lifelong fascination that led her to found the Astronomy Outreach of Kosovo, a nonprofit that created the first observatory in the nation’s history in 2024.
Now based in San Jose, Hyseni is using that experience to diversify science education in California. A typical session begins indoors with a 30-minute workshop on topics like meteorites, craters and the sun. It is followed by solar observations that turn the sky into a living laboratory where students watch explosions on the sun through Hyseni’s professional-grade telescope, connecting textbook theory to celestial phenomena, she said.
Hyseni’s next step is to expand Astronomy with Pran into a team-led initiative and secure sponsors to provide telescopes to schools. So far, she has been contacted by dozens of educators across San Jose and Santa Cruz. To streamline scheduling, she’s building a website where educators can request visits. In the meantime, she can be reached at physeni@ucsc.edu.
The show and tell portion of the workshop allows students to interact with space rocks. (Courtesy Pranvera Hyseni)