The Community College of Rhode Island will welcome the public to the Margaret M. Jacoby Observatory at the Knight Campus in Warwick during an open house next month.

The event will be held from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday, July 8. Visitors can meet astronomers and get a daytime view of the observatory, which recently underwent upgrades including new bench seating for visitors, a new control desk and work station. Control wiring also was moved underneath the floor and repairs were made to the mechanism to open the roof for viewing.

The observatory was constructed in 1978 under the direction of Jacoby, professor emeritus in CCRI’s Physics Department, and she conducted classes and open nights for the public until her retirement. The observatory was named in her honor in 1995.

The original 14-inch aperture telescope was replaced with a 16-inch Meade LX200R reflecting telescope in 2009, but the interior had remained unchanged since Jacoby’s era.

Open observation nights resumed after the upgrades on June 21 and will continue on Wednesday evenings throughout the summer, weather permitting. Visit the observatory website for updates: www.ccri.edu/observatory.

During open houses, visitors are given a constellation tour and learn how to identify points of interest in the night sky such as constellations, stars and sometimes planets that can be seen with the unaided eye. But the main attraction is the chance to look through the college’s research-grade telescope at the surface of the moon, the rings of Saturn, star clusters, nebulae and other celestial bodies.