Communicating Astronomy with the Public

Many of us who are involved in astronomy on a professional or amateur level feel that part of our mission, or duty, is to do education and public outreach. This can be showing kids who stop by your house on Halloween the Moon through a telescope, participating in a star party showing hundreds of people celestial wonders through telescopes, writing articles for your astronomy club newsletter, writing an astronomy blog or giving talks on astronomical topics to clubs, schools or after school groups like Boy Scouts.

I think an argument can be made that educating the public in math, science and critical thinking, in this technological and information based age we live, is critically important. But, we'll save that for another time.

Today, I just want to let you know about some great resources for information that can be used to do outreach activities. These resources are getting better all the time.

One excellent new resource you may not know about is the CAP Journal. The CAP Journal is a free, peer-reviewed journal available online and in print. The description from their home page tells it all:

"Public communication of astronomy provides an important link between the scientific astronomical community and society, giving visibility to scientific success stories and supporting both formal and informal science education. While the principal task of an astronomer is to further our knowledge of the Universe, disseminating this new information to a wider audience than the scientific community is becoming increasingly important. This is the main task of public astronomy communication — to bring astronomy to society."

The June 2009 issue has an article in it that I found very useful in preparing for my next round of talks in Chicago and New York in early August.
'Live Casting: Bringing Astronomy to the Masses in Real Time' by Pamela Gay, Fraser Cain et al discusses ways to do live blogging and podcasting and videocasting from astronomy conferences and conventions. They spell out the advantages and pitfalls and give the reader a complete list of what you should bring to make your attempt a success.

Communicating Astronomy with the Public also has a Facebook page with 580 members as of today. There is some valuable stuff here too, such as Matthew Ota's tips for doing outreach with a telescope-

1. Place flashing red LEDs at the base of each your telescope's tripod legs. This helps to prevent people from tripping over your tripod legs.
2. Alternatively, place split rubber traffic cones over the ends of your tripod legs, for the same effect.
3. If you can afford it, use large 2 inch wide angle eyepieces, as they are easy for the novice viewer to look through.
4. Wrap the barrels of your eyepieces with reflective tape. This helps the viewer to find the eyepiece.
5. keep a small red flashlight handy to point it at the eyepiece, so the viewer can find it.
6. Place a walker frame underneath your telescope. People naturally grab the handles of the walker, instead of grabbing the eyepiece.
7. place a low folding stepladder at the base of your telescope so the children can reach the eyepiece. Cover it with reflective tape for visibility. make sure you move it out of the way when adults view through the telescope.
8. If your telescope is a goto, announce when the telescope is slewing so that people will not be trying to look through it or are too near it when it moves.
9. Allow the viewer to adjust the focus if necessary so they can see clearly. Many people do not realize that they need glasses and look at the world, and into telescopes, with blurred vision. You can readjust the focus for the next person.
10. Bring stuff to give away. NASA is great for supplying such things as bookmarks, decals, and photographs, especially if you are working on their behalf. (Solar System Ambassador, Saturn Observation Campaign volunteer, etc.).
11. Be enthusiastic and expressive about astronomy. Your enthusiasm can be infectious to the viewers.

Another great source for news items and interesting space elated topics is the website Portal to the Universe. The Portal has news feeds from all the major space agencies, missions and observatories and feeds from hundreds of astronomy and space related blogs. Links to the latest vodcasts and podcasts are featured daily as well as the live feed of the Sun from the SOHO satellite. Featured in the side bars on the home page are the NASA, Astronomy, Lunar, and Amateur 'picture of the day'. Portal to the Universe also has a Facebook page.

To see what is going on in the International Year of Astronomy, check out their Cornerstone Projects webpage. Many of these projects also have their own Facebook pages, where you can get in touch with people from administrators of the projects to fellow enthusiasts who are interested in sharing what they know and have with you.

100 Hours of Astronomy

The Galileoscope

Cosmic Diary

She is an Astronomer

From Earth to the Universe


One of my favorite education and outreach efforts is the AAVSO Citizen Sky project. This is the biggest citizen science project ever designed. The general public is invited, encouraged and trained to help observe and analyze one of astronomy's great mysteries, the eclipsing binary Epsilon Aurigae, whose once every 27.1 years eclipse has just begun.

I am involved in several of the AAVSO's education and outreach efforts. I coordinate the AAVSO Speakers Bureau which supplies speakers for astronomical societies, clubs, star parties, schools and other events. AAVSO also has a library of PowerPoint presentations available to you to use in doing your own astronomy talks. We also have a 'filter blog', the AAVSO Writer's Bureau, which supplies monthly articles from a collection of bloggers on variable stars, supernovae, novae, gamma-ray bursts, stellar evolution, exoplanets and related stellar topics for astronomy club and society newsletter editors to use free of charge.

These are just some of the resources I know about because I am personally involved in them or use them to do outreach myself. If you know of other good resources, please leave the names, descriptions and a url in the comments section below.

Gerry Samolyk- 2009 Leslie C. Peltier Award Recipient

Gerry Samolyk is my observing grandfather, friend and travel gnome. He is also this year's recipient of the Astronomical League's Leslie Peltier Award.

Yea, that's a lot to explain. Let's see if I can make sense of all that.

First, the Leslie Peltier Award is one of the most coveted awards bestowed upon amateur astronomers. If you get named as a recipient you join what is essentially the 'hall of fame' of amateur astronomy. The Astronomical League website describes the award best:

The heart of amateur astronomy is observing. We can read all we want about astronomical phenomena, but the real joy in astronomy is going out under the night sky and observing the objects about which we have read. But while most of us are casual observers of the sky, looking at the same few objects over and over, a few amateur astronomers develop their observing skills to the ultimate degree. They then use these skills to make careful observations of the sky and record them for scientific analysis.

Whether the observation is done with a photometer, CCD, spectroscope, or just the human eye, the ability to find an object and record scientifically useful detail is not a common trait. To recognize the amateur astronomer who is not only able to do this, but has contributed his observations to an ongoing observing program, the Astronomical League presents the Leslie C. Peltier Award. The Peltier Award was created in 1980 and the first was awarded in 1981.

The award is named after Leslie C. Peltier, the Delphos, Ohio, amateur astronomer who Harlow Shapley, one of the League's founders, referred to as "the world's greatest nonprofessional astronomer". Born January 2, 1900, he discovered twelve new comets and four novae. But his real contribution was the over 132,000 variable star observations he made in his sixty-two year observing career. He also wrote many articles on astronomy and penned four books. To ease his observing, he built an enclosed "merry-go-round" observatory. He died in 1980.

It is in his memory, and to celebrate his life-long love of the heavens, that the Astronomical League presents the Leslie C. Peltier Award.

Some of the past recipients are: Walter Scott Houston, Rev. Robert Evans, David Levy, Don Parker, Janet Mattei, Dennis di Cicco, Roger Sinnot and Richard Berry. Gerry is now counted in among the heavy hitters in amateur astronomy, and it is a well-deserved honor.

As a member of the Milwaukee Astronomical Society many years ago, Gerry mentored a young observer, named Gene Hanson, in the fine art of visual variable star observing. Gene took his new found enthusiasm, moved to Arizona and became one of the world's leading variable star observers. When I joined the AAVSO, I was put in touch with a mentor through the AAVSO Mentor Program. He saved me untold time and mistakes by imparting his wisdom via many, many long emails. My mentor? Gene Hanson, the 2002 recipient of the Leslie Peltier Award. So I can track my observing heritage back to Gerry through Gene, making him my observing grandfather.

In fact my observing heritage can actually be traced back to the very first recipient of the Leslie Peltier Award, Ed Halbach, Gerry's mentor and inspiration.

Gerry's story and history are best told in the citation given by Roger Kolman, the AL Leslie C. Peltier Award Committee Chairman.

The recipient of the 2009 Leslie C. Peltier Award of the Astronomical League is Gerhard (Gerry) Samolyk of the Milwaukee Astronomical Society. The MAS has a long history in the Astronomical League. Ed Halbach was one of the founders of the League in 1947. Through the years, the MAS has been a great supporter of League activities.

When informed of his selection, Gerry said: “This is quite a surprise. I'm aware that Ed Halbach was the first recipient of this award and that Bill Albrect and Walter Scott Houston (all from the MAS) had also received it. Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend the convention in NY.” Gerry will be in China chasing the Sun during the total solar eclipse.

Gerry first became interested in astronomy as a result of the early space program. He still has a copy of the summer 1958 issue of Space Journal that covered the launch of Explorer I. He first met Ed Halbach while in high school. Like so many others, he was infected by Ed's enthusiasm and energy. Ed got him involved in observing lunar occultations and grazes. In the early 1970's, Gerry started observing eclipsing stars and a few years latter, RR Lyr stars. He has followed in Ed's footsteps and has served as the observatory director for the Milwaukee Astronomical Society (MAS) since 1980. In the AAVSO, Gerry teamed up with Marvin Baldwin on the EB and RR Lyr committees. They developed a computerized system for the reduction and publication of EB times of minimum. As a result, over 15,000 times of minimum were published.

For many years Gerry did visual observing by setting up as many scopes as they had at the observatory, setting each scope on a different target and following 12 or more stars simultaneously. Over 10 years ago, he got involved with CCD photometry. Between club and personal equipment, he can run up to seven CCD rigs and continue to make time series observations on multiple targets. To date he has probably made over 250,000 observations of EB and RR Lyr stars. The Internet now allows him to set up multi-site observing campaigns coordinating with observers in Europe, Australia, and Japan. This results in very long observing runs.

Notably, on April 4th Gerry was in the twin cities for the celebration of Ed Halbach's 100th birthday.

Obviously, Gerry Samolyk is a worthy recipient of the Leslie C. Peltier Award of the Astronomical League.

We are very grateful for the support of Scott Roberts and Explore Scientific for the sponsorship of this award.

Roger S. Kolman, Chairman
L.C. Peltier Award Committee
Astronomical League

I met Gerry for the first time in 1999 when I went to my first AAVSO meeting in Hyannis, MA. Gene was there for my first meeting, and between the two of them I got an excellent indoctrination into the history, activities, people and excitement of the AAVSO. They had a fish on the line and they expertly drew me in hook, line and sinker.

After attending my fifth AAVSO meeting, in Hawaii, Irene and I were going through the hundreds of pictures she had taken and we were astonished at how many of them featured Gerry Samolyk in one way or another. In the bar at the hotel, down by the beach where we rented snorkeling equipment, at the visitor's center on Mauna Kea, at the summit of Mauna Kea, next to me next to the Keck telescope, behind Irene at the Volcanoes National Park- he was everywhere we were!

Then we went back through our pictures of previous meetings. There he was again, in dozens of pictures of us in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and California. It was then that Irene dubbed Gerry 'our travel gnome'. He's been on trips with us to Arizona, England, Massachusetts (several times), Illinois and again to California this spring. At every meeting we go to we make sure to get pictures of Gerry now.

I remember I got a little bent out of shape over it in England. We took a long bus tour from Cambridge to Stonehenge and Avesbury that took an entire day. When we finally got back to the hotel that night I downloaded the pictures from the day onto my laptop. As we examined the images, it became painfully obvious that Irene had taken two, count them TWO, pictures of me next to the monolithic stone outcroppings. On the other hand we had a half dozen pictures of Gerry and about two dozen pictures of sheep and crows! Irene loves to do animal pictures. (No offense, Gerry.)

Irene finally confessed to Gerry in a pub one night in England that we were now purposely taking images of him and calling him our travel gnome. I think it was because she was afraid he was beginning to think she was weird, shooting pictures of him on our vacations. We all had a good laugh over it and a couple of pints.

The Leslie Peltier Award couldn't go to a nicer, more deserving man. Congratulations, Gramps. Well done.

New Astronomy Book from National Geographic!

National Geographic sent me a copy of their brand new astronomy guide to review, and I'm glad they did. Backyard Guide to the Night Sky is a great new, up to date addition to the list of available field guides on the shelves of book sellers these days.

The first thing you'll notice when you pick it up is the handy 5.5 by 8 inch carry along size. The second thing you notice, just by thumbing through the pages, is this handsome little field guide is richly illustrated. I would expect nothing less from National Geographic.

The book is divided into 10 chapters, beginning with observing basics, the atmosphere, sun, moon and planets. Each of these chapters is designed into two page articles, so every time you turn a leaf you are into a new topic. This makes it very attractive for two reasons. One, it breaks up an enormous amount of information into manageable pieces, and two, each section can be referred to later as a reference on that specific subject.

The brevity necessitated by this format prohibits in depth discussion of topics, but this book is meant to be more of an introduction to astronomy than a thorough text.

Along with the main text, the book is brimming with sidebars, boxes, tables, fast facts and objects of interest. The progression of topics is logical and easy to follow.

There are a few minor typos including the subtext for 'Five Coolest Things in the Sky' reading "Every beginning sky watcher should seek out these ten fascinating naked-eye features." But these are minimal. More importantly, I found the factual information to be correct throughout.

The second half of the book deals with stars and constellations. It deals effectively with star birth and stellar evolution, double stars and star clusters. Novae, supernovae and black holes are covered in two pages and variable stars are given just a side box under double stars, but I won't hold that against this volume. Especially since it makes a point of calling astrology a pseudoscience in no uncertain terms when explaining the zodiac.

Chapter seven features seasonal fold-flat, two-page star maps as shown from roughly 40 degrees north latitude. Due to the small size of the book, the all sky star maps are about the equivalent of a 7 inch planisphere. The gap in the maps between pages is most unfortunate for the winter sky. Orion, Taurus and Auriga are interrupted and lost in the crease of the book. The other seasons are less affected. Stars down to about 5th magnitude, the Milky Way, ecliptic and many deep sky objects are included and the constellations are clearly and neatly delineated.

In conjunction with chapter seven, chapter eight could be considered the heart of this book. It contains charts of individual constellations. Each constellation section contains a star map, and a combination of fast facts, mythology, tables of the brightest stars and boxes containing lists of interesting objects contained in the constellation. As an example of the up to date content in this guide, the upcoming eclipse of epsilon Aurigae is discussed at some length in the chapter on Auriga.

A useful feature not included might have been a guide to pronouncing the constellation names. I know experienced amateurs and professionals who still butcher Camelopardalis! Happily, several constellation's interesting objects were variable stars, including Z Cam and VZ Cam in Camelopardalis.

Chapter 9 does a very good job of describing comets, meteors, meteor showers and their origins, as well as the concept of earth as target in a shooting gallery in space. Chapter 10, Deep Space, deals with the universe, the big bang, dark matter and many of the topics that are the frontier of cosmology today. The topics are treated in the same two page brevity of the earlier chapters, but nonetheless cover the ground surprisingly well in a few pages.

For a book whose purpose is to introduce the reader to a wealth of information, it hits on all cylinders. This will make a great first astronomy book for any teen or adult just getting their feet wet in astronomy and observing the night sky.

I consider myself to be an experienced observer, yet I found myself learning new things and marveling at the clarity of the descriptions of topics I know well. I plan to keep my copy out in the observatory for those nights when we have visitors. It will be a great quick reference for questions people always ask, like- how far, what magnitude, how big, how old, when was it discovered, etc. What's more, there are nice pictures and illustrations to help answer the questions.

For $21.95 USD, this is a great buy. Go get one.

Backyard Guide to the Night Sky
By Howard Schneider
ISBN: 978-1-4262-0281-0

Carnival of Space #112

Carnival of Space #112 this week is mostly a tip of the hat to the Moon, as Ken Murphy of Out of the Cradle explains:

"This week’s edition just so happens to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon, so I am particularly pleased that Fraser was kind enough to let me host for the fifth time so that I can share with everyone the abundant riches of our Moon, courtesy of our good friend Selene."

Simostronomy's contribution is last week's The Summer We Flew to the Moon.

We give a solid two thumbs up to Ken's edition of the Carnival. He has done an outstanding job of collecting, organizing and presenting a literal mountain of blogs and organizing them around a timely, topical theme.

The Summer We Flew to the Moon

In July this year, I gave a talk at my local astronomy club, the Warren Astronomical Society. Part of each meeting is set aside to discuss astronomy related news and upcoming events. One story was about Russian cosmonauts who had just emerged from an isolation experiment intended to study the effects of being cooped up together on a mission to Mars. The other big story was the approaching 40th anniversary of the historic Apollo moon landing.

These stories got me thinking about when I was 12 years old and my friend, Bob Dostie, and I decided to build our own isolation experiment. We had read about students building space capsules to test their ability to withstand the rigors of being confined in a small space, much like the Apollo astronauts of the day were enduring, for up to several weeks at a time. Most or all of the experiments we read about took place in schools with permission and support from the teachers, staff and parents. But it was summer vacation, so Bob and I decided to build our own capsule in the attic over the garage at my house.

Our home was a two-story colonial back then, with an attached two-car garage. My dad had a workshop and storage shelves, and he stored his boat and his dragster in there. The attic over the garage was accessed through an approximately 2x4 foot panel that you pushed up into the attic from on top of a stepladder. If you wanted to get up in the attic you had to lift yourself up from atop the ladder, and drag yourself onto the wooden floor, much like climbing out of a pool, except without the advantage of buoyancy.

Getting down was much more perilous. You had to hang out over the edge of the hole, line yourself up with the top of the ladder and lower yourself down onto a step with very little margin for error. I shudder to think about it now, but we were kids; we did it all the time. It was up and down this ladder we hauled all our materials and accessories for the space capsule.

We had the seat and back from an old car that we adapted into our space lounger. We angled the back to resemble the pictures we’d seen of the astronaut seats in the Mercury and Apollo capsules. We even had seat belts to secure us, for blast off and landings.

We scrounged together hundreds of electrical switches, knobs and lights and created a massive two-man control panel. Some of the lights and switches actually did things and lit up. We used the pitch of the attic roof to our advantage and had the control panel just over our heads as we laid on the astronaut lounger in space travel orientation.

Bob’s dad worked for the phone company, so we were able to ‘borrow’ a couple hundred feet of wire and two phones that we actually hooked up from the house to the space capsule so we could call ‘mission control’ for more soft drinks and sandwiches when we needed them. We had electricity; a cooler, a radio, a fan and we spent weeks working on our experiment getting ready for the big day.

We thought we could last for about a week, but decided we’d be happy if we made it for three or four days the first time we traveled into space. We calculated how many sodas, sandwiches, bags of chips, Twinkies and other snacks we would need to take with us to the Moon and back, and stocked up. All conditions were go and we triumphantly blasted off Monday morning after breakfast.

The first day wasn’t too bad. It was kind of like camping in the attic. We hung out, played astronaut, listened to the radio, ate our sandwiches and snacks and drank our sodas. It wasn’t long before we had to use our space toilet to eliminate those sodas, but we were pretty satisfied with the plastic bag we’d rigged up to be our space potty.

After the sun went down, we got the call from mission control to see if we were still okay. Things couldn’t be better as far as we were concerned, so we spent our first night in the dark in the attic over the garage.

The next morning we had to empty our bladders again first thing before breakfast, and we noted with some concern that we had seriously underestimated the volume of pee our space toilet could hold. It was shortly after lunch that our inadequate space potty became a serious threat to the mission. Bob had to poop.

I seem to remember that I had to poop too, but there was no way I was sitting on that thing, so I had resolved to just hold it until it was time to call off the mission, and I would just run into the house as fast as I could when we decided we just couldn’t take it any more.

But Bob really had to poop.

Finally Bob said, “the heck with this, let’s call it off. I have to go now.” So we pulled up the attic door and discovered to our horror that the ladder was not there any more. Someone had put it away, and there was no way we could risk jumping down from there while still within Earth’s gravity!

We sent out a desperate call to mission control, but no one was home. It was the middle of a fine summer day and everyone else was off doing summer things, outdoors, in the fresh air. We were not only jealous, we were stuck in the attic, I mean, space capsule.

Bob started to cry.

I tried to reassure him. “How bad can it be? C’mon, just get it over with and we can go on with the mission.” Eventually, reluctantly, Bob braved it and deposited several loud, stinky astronaut bombs into the space toilet.

Now we had a new problem. Our air supply was severely compromised.

The stench wafting out of the space toilet was overpowering, and it was getting worse as the mid-day sun beat down on the roof of the attic. We sat for a long time in quiet humiliation, listening to the fan pitifully trying to blow the astronaut stench out the attic vent above the astronaut control panel. I tried sealing up the bag and moving it closer to the door, and we thought about lowering the bag down with a rope to get it out of the spaceship, but we hadn’t thought to bring a rope on our lunar mission. So we just sat there with an alarmingly large bag of urine, tissue and feces waiting for mission control, or anyone, even aliens, to rescue us from our plight.

After what seemed like hours and hours, we heard someone open the garage door below us and cried out for help. It was my little brother, Dale. My God, I was never so happy to see him ever in my life as that moment. We begged him to get the ladder and come up to collect our ‘garbage’. We didn’t dare tell him what it really was, because the smell had subsided somewhat by now, and we had decided if he would just take the astronaut waste bag away we would continue the mission.

He pulled the ladder over to the hole, climbed up, and peered into the space capsule. He was only eight years old at the time, so his bespectacled blue eyes just barely cleared the opening to the attic from the top of the ladder. I told him if he would take out our garbage I would let him play spaceship with us sometime when we were done with the mission. He said okay and I carefully handed him the plastic kitchen bag full of bad things.

That was the day I learned never to lie to my little brother Dale. He took the bag and headed down the ladder. When he got half way down he promptly threw the bag out into the middle of the garage, thinking it was just solid waste. Bob and I stared at each other in horror, as we understood immediately what the sickening sound Ka-SPLASH meant.

The space potty receptacle bag had exploded in the garage like a water balloon full of sewage. There was pee and poop and tissue all over the floor, the boat trailer and my dad’s drag racer. Our mission was over.

We never did make it to the moon, and we didn’t spend a lot of time up in the attic after that. I guess the glow had worn off the idea. And even though we played baseball, rode our bikes, went swimming and exploring the woods together the rest of that summer, Bob and I never became the best of friends. I lost track of him and most of my neighborhood friends long ago, but I’ll bet Bob, wherever he is, remembers the summer we tried to fly to the moon.

Epsilon Aurigae and Citizen Sky

It's back! The AAVSO podcast for 365 Days of Astronomy is here.

In this episode, I interview Rebecca Turner, project manager for Citizen Sky to find out all about the strange star epsilon Aurigae and the AAVSO’s citizen science project to study it. This will be the largest citizen science research project in history, and the goal is to understand one of the most enigmatic stars in the sky.