UCSC astronomy Ph.D. survived war and helped build Kosovo’s first observatory. Now she’s bringing the cosmos to Bay Area classrooms.

Soon after the Kosovo War had ended and her family emerged from the forest where they had hidden from the bombs and violence, 4-year-old Pranvera Hyseni saw her first partial solar eclipse. Inside their war-damaged home, her grandfather improvised to show her the shimmering ring of the sun obscured by the moon in the reflection of water inside a bucket. 

“Because we did not have a telescope, we didn’t have solar glasses, my grandfather took a bucket, filled it with water and placed it indoors,” she recalled. “That definitely was the first thing that made me think, ‘Oh, wait, there is something cool happening with the sky.’”

Even in 1999, most people in Shallc, their rural village, were panicked by the phenomenon of the moon passing in front of the sun because they didn’t have access to information about astronomy, Hyseni said. 

Hyseni, now 30 and a Ph.D. candidate in astronomy at UC Santa Cruz, has spent half her life working to make sure the next time a solar eclipse happens, Kosovars will have the knowledge and the tools to appreciate it. After years of networking, fundraising and construction, in July 2024 Hyseni and other volunteers opened The National Observatory and Planetarium of Kosovo. Now she’s turning her focus toward educating Bay Area youth on astronomy.

From a young age, Hyseni wanted others to get excited about her field. Her passion is all the more remarkable considering Hyseni didn’t have access to information about astronomy growing up in a rural village in postwar Kosovo, a Balkan republic of 1.5 million people. 

She credits her interest in astronomy to her late grandfather, who showed her the solar eclipse, and to one of her older sisters, who wanted to be an astronaut. She was two years older than Hyseni, and died in a tragic accident at a young age: “I feel like I’m carrying this dream for both of us.”

“She was the first who taught me the planets in order from the sun,” she said. “I remember she would test me on that, and I would not say them in order. I would say, like, Mars, Pluto, Mercury, and she would laugh so much.” 

She remembers when her home first got access to the internet in around 2009. Hyseni began connecting online with people who were interested in astronomy and learning English along the way. 

One of those first connections was a man in Croatia who offered to donate her a telescope – which was nearly impossible to find in Kosovo at the time. Her father traveled to northern Macedonia to pick up the 3-inch telescope – a good size for a beginner. 

“In Kosovo you wouldn’t be able to buy [it],” Hyseni said. “It’s not something you just walk in the store and you find a telescope. It’s very, very rare.”

At the age of 15, Hyseni hosted her first sky viewing event in 2010 in Pristina, the Kosovo capital. She invited the public to view a solar eclipse with free solar eclipse glasses and through her three telescopes. Thousands of people attended, including several people who became friends and eventually founded their nonprofit, Astronomy Outreach of Kosovo. They invite people to view the sky from their telescopes and learn about astronomy.

Hyseni posted photos of the long lines of people queuing up outside the event on Facebook. Astronomers around the globe were impressed by the level of interest from so many young people. They wanted to donate telescopes, and invited her to visit their observatories and to talk about her story. While on her first international trip, to Australia in 2016, she heard about astronomers who had built backyard observatories. That made her wonder: Could we build an observatory in Kosovo? She continued her travels and studies with that goal in mind. 

In 2018, while at a conference in New York, she met the CEO of Celestron, a telescope manufacturer based in Torrance, California. He pledged to donate a 14-inch telescope to her project. 

With the telescope, Hyseni then talked with her Astronomy Outreach of Kosovo team about next steps such as funding and the facility design. They decided that the observatory should also have a planetarium – a room with a dome that projects the night sky view to make the facility more welcoming for public access. 

With their design idea of an observatory and the planetarium, they estimated it would cost about 300,000 euros to build the project. They set up a meeting with a member of Kosovo’s parliament to request the funding, and shortly after the Kosovo government voted to contribute 300,000 euros. In 2022, they started construction. 

The facility has a 50-seat planetarium where visitors can view the sky on the ceiling of a 9-meter-wide dome and adjacent to it is the 6-meter-wide dome for the observatory. The observatory houses a 14-inch-wide telescope donated by Celestron. Another telescope — the largest solar telescope in Eastern Europe — is on the observatory’s terrace. It was donated by Atlanta-based nonprofit The Charlie Bates Solar Astronomy Project. Hyseni said schools visit almost daily and bring about 100 kids each day. 

“It was one of the greatest accomplishments that my team and I probably did for Kosovo,” she said. “And now I am here, I’m pursuing my dreams of becoming a planetary astronomer, but at least I know that I left something behind in Kosovo.”

Hyseni thinks to the moment she gave a speech on the opening day of the observatory and how each person in that room believed in her idea and supported her project over the course of several years. If she hadn’t come up with the idea, Kosovo wouldn’t have the donated telescope and no one — the members of the Kosovo government, Celestron’s team, her supporters — would’ve been there to celebrate. 

“Everybody’s here, because I thought about this. And it’s not something I would like to ever say in public, but I know that,” she said. “That means that, yes, you can dream something big. You can make it happen. It’s not like it’s fate or something. It’s really hard work and being persistent and committed to what you want,” she said. “I’m just kind of keeping the same energy.” 

On the day the Kosovo observatory opened last year, Hyseni thought of her mother, who died of COVID-19, her sister and her grandfather. But she was also proud, happy and exhausted after working to set up the observatory with her fellow Astronomy Outreach of Kosovo team members for 10 days straight. She was in disbelief that it was even happening. 

“All these mixed emotions were coming to me like happy, sad, exhausted, proud. How did I process all that in such a short amount of time? I don’t think I will ever have anything in my life that will be so chaotic and so incredibly awesome at the same time,” she said.

Hyseni hasn’t been back to the observatory since the launch more than a year ago. She’s busy teaching, doing her research at UCSC, and launching an outreach program to introduce young people to astronomy called Astronomy with Pran. 

On Wednesday, she visited her first school, Adelante II Dual Language Academy in San Jose, where she spoke to 132 students in five classes. She talked about astronomy, demonstrated her telescope and gave students the opportunity to see the sun and its dark sunspots – areas that are cooler on the sun. They also got to touch a space rock. 

“Who wants to see a space rock?” she asked a group of about 20 elementary students between the ages of 9 and 10, as she held a black, shining rock. The students jumped and shouted “Me!” in unison. She handed the meteorite over to one student, whose eyes opened wide in awe. 

Next month, Hyseni plans to visit six more schools – mostly elementary schools – in Campbell, Los Altos, San Jose and Pleasanton. She lives in San Jose but is open to visiting Santa Cruz schools. 

Meanwhile, she’s working to complete her research and doctorate by next summer. She’s fallen in love with the Northern California area so she hopes to get a job locally to stay. 

Hyseni studies minor planets, asteroids, comets and meteorites and how they’re all related. By studying extraterrestrial organic molecules, Hyseni says, researchers can learn about how these pieces of our solar system formed, and maybe how they could have contributed to creating life on earth. 

“I study minor planets … because we think that life might have come from comets and asteroids,” she said. “I always loved asteroids.”

From a fourth-floor lab at UCSC’s Earth and Marine Sciences building, she studies these celestial bodies using data from NASA telescopes in Hawaii. She’s currently taking an astrophysics class this quarter. She’s also in her fourth year of working as a teaching assistant for professor Ian Garrick-Bethell, who specializes in lunar geophysics and planetary magnetism. 

From afar, Hyseni supports the development of the Kosovo observatory, which is run by Astronomy Outreach of Kosovo and its board. She hopes to visit it soon to help with any needed building upgrades, fundraising and starting a research program. 

When she looks back at how far she has come since surviving a war just 26 years ago, she credits her family and the support of other amateur astronomers with helping her become a professional astronomer, and with supporting astronomy in Kosovo. 

“When you don’t have something and then you have it, you find it more valuable,” she said. “Especially with freedom now – we are a very patriotic country, we’re very happy we’re free, and we just don’t take it for granted.” 

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