FORT WAYNE, Ind. (AP): A professor hopes construction of a telescope observatory on the Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne campus will help boost interest in astronomy among students.
 
Work started this week on building the small observatory on the north end of the campus. The observatory will house an 8-inch mirror telescope that should be operational by early September.
 
Physics professor Steve Gillam tells The News-Sentinel (http://bit.ly/1IcbqDx ) he's been trying to get a campus observatory built to help teach astronomy since he joined the IPFW faculty in 2012 after working as an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
 
Gillam says IPFW also plans to have sky viewing events for the general public.
 
The cost for the $25,000 project is being shared by three campus departments.