Community Outreach

All,

As the dark nights are with us again, the topic of community outreach comes up at this time of year.

In order to help with this, I would appreciate if we could use this thread to gather together experiences, reports, suggestions, tips and general comments on how clubs can reach out to their local community. This may be in the form of having a meeting in a local school or charity organisation or public observing event.

If you are interested in participating in this through your club or have experiences to share which may be useful to others, we'd love to hear from you. We'd greatly appreciate if we could gather this information together in one central area in this thread. That way, it may help other people/clubs to participate in this. So:
* Have you organised a public meeting/star party/other community event?
* Want to share your experiences?
* How did you organise it?
* Experience any problems?
* Any suggestions?

Your help on this would be greatly appreciated.


Admin,
I've stuck this under "General" for the mo, as I was unsure of a proper home for it. Ideally I'd like to make it a Sticky as it will hopefully contain lots of useful detail which Club Committees may find useful. As a suggestion, how about moving it under "Links" and renaming "Links" to "Resources" or something like that perhaps? Any other ideas?

Regards & Thanks,

Michael,
We in Kerry AC have done quite a few of these. See www.kerryastronomyclub.com/outreach.htm for just some of the reports.
The contacts to initiate the process usually comes from word of mouth through the members. Another great ice breaker is to give them some freebies like the Cassini outreach material (thanks Dierdre!) Every National school and scout group will welcome you with open arms. (what teacher would not like a quite afternoon ) This age group, 5th and 6th classes are very open and interested in the subject, specially if you bring suitable visual props.
Secondary schools are another problem entirely. Unless it is on the syllabus and a possible exam question, forget it, that is our experience anyway but then we have not really pushed outreach there too much, so I may be wrong.
We are at present looking at trying to setup a more structured system, where we have sets of props, some presentations, some projects for the students to do, etc ready to go when the school is ready and some one has the time off to go.
Problems? We usually run way over time!
As for suggestions? Just make the first contact and it will work from there.

Shannonside in Limerick (mainly through the great work of our PRO, Conn Buckley) visited a school at the start of this year, it was a joint primary/secondary school, but it was mainly the younger kids and who had an interest, there were a small select few who were very keenly interested. There was one kid in particular who qued up a number of times to see the same object again and again as he didnt want to hog the eyepiece, its great to see such enthusiasm and that made it all worth it for me.
It was on a saturday night and we got well over 100 people at it. Our plan was to have a slide show and show a number of scopes, if the weather was clear we'd then go and have a look at the sky, luckily it was clear and many got a look at the pleiades, a first quarter moon and Mars.

As it happends the club is going to another school in the next 2 weeks, we'll try the same again, unfortunately, we'll have no moon nor anyplanets, but we'll gve it a good go anyway. I'll let you know how it went.

It was the articles in the weekend Limerick Leader that brought the club to the schools attention, so they seem to be having an impact. We also know that some schools are collecting the articles and using them in classes, we also put astro images (hubble) and homebrew images in these articles, as text alone can be dry sometimes.

just following on from what mike has said. AT kerry Astronomy club we also held open telescope nights. From what I remember I think we held this early in the new year to benefit from all the new telescopes purchased at xmas

We also held a number of public observing sessions throughout the year.
For all our public events we have had great support from the local press.
We pick a day and with luck it will be clear. So far we have been reasonable successful, although sometimes the weather does not play ball. It might be no harm planning a session for two nights in a row.

At the public observing sessions, the moon and of course saturn are the big crowd pleasers. perhaps we should aim to do something for this in the new year.

It never ceases to amaze me that in schools, our Solar System, our place in it, our exploration of it and our responsibility to it, is not prioritised in education for every child, everywhere.

In 2004 I was invited to join The Saturn Observation Campaign. I signed up in September of that year and that began a very interesting journey in voluntary outreach education. I was very well supported by Jane H Jones in JPL Cassini Outreach Education.

I began by writing several articles about Cassini for Irish astronomical publications.

On November 24th 2004 I gave my first talk to school children in Greystones, Co Wicklow, it was the story of Cassini using models of Saturn, Titan and an Earth globe. This was to small children in their classrooms, then Ring World for the older children in the hall, with Cassini outreach media for each class and each child at the presentation.


I used to show Ring World and give an introductory talk, over time that developed into PowerPoint presentations using the latest images from the mission.

Ring World is great but is a little long for some kids, and I have found that their attention is better kept by slideshows and speaking to them. Or by showing part of the DVD and combining a slide show. Then give the disc to the teachers to further their interest in the mission and our Solar system.

There is a massive body of ready made presentations on the multimedia section of the Cassini website saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/products/CHARM.cfm
CHARMS Cassini-Huygens Analysis and Results from the Mission.
All you have to do is familiarise yourself with the data, print off the talk and download the images and away ye go. You must credit the experts who have written and put the presentation together for you of course. You may need to be a member of the SOC, you could check by sending an e mail to jane.h.jones@jpl.nasa.gov


I have visited some schools on more than one occasion and it is to those schools the next phase of outreach is targeted. I organised several Star Parties to follow up on the children’s interest in Cassini and Saturn. These events are organised with the schools cooperation and bring the children, parents and teachers eyeball to eyepiece to Saturn. We also show the first quarter moon and some M objects.

With Saturn becoming an earlier object in the New Year, I hope to repeat this for the two recent school outreach visits. My colleagues in the IAS have been very supportive for these telescope events and we have also been joined by astronomers from other societies.

My Cassini/Saturn presentation/talk has now developed into a Solar System talk with the story of Cassini built into the presentation. This is going down very well as the Solar System is now on the primary school curriculum. Not all teachers have dealt with it yet, so it’s very useful to support teachers with a presentation like this. The role of informal outreach education is to support teachers and children in the understanding of the wonders of our Solar System and bring the images and media too them in their class rooms.
soc.jpl.nasa.gov/experience/gallery-photo.cfm?id=336

I have given over thirty talks/presentations since I began this outreach journey that equates to several thousand people. It is I have found a mere drop in the ocean, of the need in this type of education in Irish schools.

Teachers are wonderful and welcoming for these talks, but they have very little time to deal with bringing awareness of our Solar system, robot exploration of it, or the Universe in general, too children. Their curriculum is choc er block and I always feel privileged if a school lets me in to speak.

At Star Parties you get asked the same questions “Why is everything upside down in the telescope”? et cetra et certa. When I was in Texas this year an astronomer who is committed to outreach gave me this link. This manual contains very comprehensive answers to many questions that pop up at public star parties. Now this is part of the Nightsky Network outreach effort and the Tool Kits are not available outside the US.

However the bits and pieces are not difficult to make and they are all imaged in this pdf download. Its huge 13Mb, 124 pages but it is very useful and clear in its explanations. nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/docs/0ScopeManual.pdf

Merry Christmas to all

Deirdre Kelleghan