Bust out your planners, calendars, and PDAs (if you are throwback like that), it’s time to mark your calendars for the HMNS events of this week!

Last week’s featured #HMNSBlockParty creation is by Richard.

Want to get your engineering handwork featured? Drop by our brand-new Block Party interactive play area and try your own hand building a gravity-defying masterpiece. Tag your photos with #HMNSBlockParty.

Lecture – Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas by Jeanette Peterson
Tuesday, Jan. 12
6:30 p.m.
The Virgin of Guadalupe is famously migratory, traversing continents and crossing and recrossing oceans. The Virgin’s earliest cult originated in medieval Europe, where the Black Madonna of Spain played a significant role in the Reconquista and garnered royal backing. The Spanish Guadalupe accompanied the conquistadors as part of the spiritual arsenal used to Christianize the Americas, where new images of the Virgin acted as catalysts to implant her devotion within multiethnic constituencies. Dr. Jeanette Peterson will trace the symbolic and racial implications of the shift from the Spanish black Madonna to the brown-skinned Our Lady of Guadalupe in the Americas.

Lecture – The U-2 Incident: Facts and Fictions by Francis Gary Powers, Jr.
Wednesday, Jan. 13
6:30 p.m.
U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and Soviet spy Rudolph Abel walked across the “Bridge of Spies” to their respective freedom on May 1, 1960 in Potsdam. Abel was welcomed home as a hero to the Soviet Union. But Powers returned home labeled a traitor in the media. Using FOIA requests, declassified files and his father’s memoirs, Francis Gary Powers, Jr., the Cold War pilot’s son, will reveal the full story of what actually happened in this most sensational espionage case in Cold War history. The truth allowed his father to justly emerge as a Cold War hero, eventually decorated with a Silver Star posthumously.

This insider account of the Cold War spy exchange is now the subject of the major motion picture Bridge of Spies by Steven Spielberg starring Tom Hanks. Francis Gary Powers, Jr. is founder and chairman emeritus of The Cold War Museum in Vint Hill, Virginia 40 miles from Washington, DC. Books Strangers on a Bridge by James Donovan and Operation Overflight Francis Gary Powers will be available following the lecture.

Class – Get a New Telescope?
George Observatory 
Saturday, Jan.16
1:00 p.m.
Did you get a new Refracting or Reflecting telescope for Christmas? (non-electronic or computerized telescopes) Come let an expert astronomer teach you how to set it up your scope so that it will work. It’s not as easy as the box would lead you to believe! After you have helpit will be easy to use. The astronomer will help you set up and learn some stars so that you will be successful. Bring all the parts and the instructions that came with the new telescope. If you want to stay later, you can allow the public to come look through your new scope and see how much fun it is to volunteer at the George Observatory.

Class – Get a New Go-To & Computerized Telescope?
George Observatory 
Saturday, Jan. 16
3:00 p.m.
Did you get a new Go-To & Computerized telescope for Christmas? Come let an expert astronomer teach you how to set it up and polar align your scope so that it will work. It’s not as easy as the box would lead you to believe! After you have help…it will be easy to use. The astronomer will help you set up and learn stars to line up with so that you will be successful. Bring all the parts and the instructions that came with the new telescope. If you want to stay later, you can allow the public to come look through your new scope and see how much fun it is to volunteer at the George Observatory.