I was wondering if anyone else has done any kind of astronomy public outreach and if they had any advice to help keep the engagement up when folks are taking turns peeking through the scope.
About 20 years or so, yup. Star parties, observatories, planetaria, etc.
My plan has been to teach the basics of star finding, telescope use, etc.
Don’t do this. The people who are going to show up to look through a telescope at the park do not GAF about how to use a telescope. They want to look through it and be awed by what they see. The work it takes to get to that point is of zero interest to 99.999% of them. Very often, the actual visual image you see is not awe inspiring, though, so you want to spend the time while people are looking through the lens explaining to them what they are seeing, and doing so in very awe-inspiring tones and terms.
Lead them to the feelings that they want to feel. Weave the story that reflects those desires back to them. Do everything you can to make them feel the scope of what they’re seeing. Use the fact that it’s an unimpressive smudge to hammer home just how god damn far away it is they are seeing. Trot out the big numbers. Tell them how far away it is in in light years, and then switch to miles. Reference what was taking place on Earth at the time the light first left its source. Relate it all to the things they relate to or care about.
And treat the telescope like it’s the least important thing of the night until someone asks about it.
Thanks, that all makes sense! I noticed in hindsight that people were a little less jazzed about Trapezium than I was expecting. I mean, they appreciated it, but compared to my own initial reaction in seeing it (I had to go and tell someone right away), it was pretty muted. Sounds like I’ll have to do some homework.
That last line really grabbed my attention.
And treat the telescope like it’s the least important thing of the night until someone asks about it.
Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean here?
Also, I should probably make clear that this is going to be a weekly recurring class that happens at different city parks. I’m trying to get people interested in actually doing amateur astronomy.
Imagine going to a public class on… let’s say playing the electric guitar, and the instructor just keeps going on and on about tuning forks, gear maintenance, and music theory. You were just hoping to learn how to play Stairway to Heaven, despite never having touched a guitar in your life.
The telescope is actually a hurdle to most people who will ever look through one. Introducing people to amateur astronomy by talking about making the sausage doesn’t whet the appetite. It’s dry, it’s small, and it’s boring. And it’s not relevant to 90% of people who will ever show up – they’re not going to race out and spend hundreds of dollars on a worthwhile telescope. It’s the kind of thing you talk about once people are hooked, want to view things independently, and are actually ready to invest their time, energy, and money into the hobby.
Amateur astronomy happens first in the mind. The imagination is accessible; the nitty gritty of operating a manual telescope is actually quite exclusionary, and fails to meet people where they actually are.
This is great advice, I’m very grateful that you responded! I did start out pointing out the constellations and the different features we would look at, but after reading this, I realize now that I got people looking into the scope way too early, and there was basically nowhere left for me to go after that. This also makes me think about doing a separate thing just for helping people get astronomical league certs, then.
Earth-like is a very broad term. If an organism has something similar to DNA or shared any kind of chemical processes it could be “earth-like”.
As an odd hypothetical example, there is a theory that fungi could potentially spread from planet to planet. Even with a billion or so years of independent evolution, fungi on Venus and fungi on Earth could still share some of the same traits.
I wonder what the final nail in the coffin will be for MOND. It seems like there’s new observations every few months supporting Lambda-CDM (even if it’s obviously not complete) over MOND. At some point, MOND is just a clever idea that was worth exploring and didn’t pan out.
I follow this stuff (as a non-physicist) so I understood it. It’s a pretty shallow article and mentions there there’s still evidence for the widely-accepted Lambda-CDM model. But like most coverage of MOND it declines to give good alternate explanations for specific key observations like the Bullet Cluster, gravitational lensing, and galactic outer rotational speeds.
So yeah a new observation that fits better with MOND than LCDM is certainly interesting, but it doesn’t flip the tables unless it does a better job explaining the prior phenomena too.
I understand the two theories and the difference between them, but when my brain tries to comprehend how gravity actually works I experience a comprehension failure.
Haha, well if it’s any consolation, nobody fully understands it. That’s why we’re still looking at various theories of quantum gravity or even random gravity.
oh boy, get ready people. it starts with a movie, then it’s a debut single, then you’re buying the fanzines, the hats, the shirts. this ends in commemorative plates.
Isn’t an event horizon just a question of being dense enough to bend light past the point of no escape?
A hollow planet supporting a detached core with enough density to have an event horizon seems kinda ridiculous… If even light can’t escape it, I don’t see some rocky ‘shell’ withstanding that much gravity. Any hollow section would have collapsed well before reaching the point of the planet’s densest point forming an event horizon.
What matters is the total mass of the black hole, not its density. If you replaced Earth’s core with a black hole of the same mass, the gravity you’d feel at the surface (or beneath the surface) would be the same. You’d only notice a difference if you were in the hollow region formed by removing the core.
The way I see it, the real problem with a planet like Earth is that because the inside is so hot, the inner parts are too soft to support their own weight, and the crust is probably too fragile to support its own weight. That’s not a problem, though, in an asteroid or a planet that’s solid all the way through.
Depending on the mass of the black hole, the “shell” doesn’t need to be a shell it could be effectively completely solid with an atom sized black hole at the centre.
PBH’s as discussed in this article have pretty wild mass ranges, so anything is possible. It’s entirely possible to have black holes so small they can’t easily absorb new matter as they’re smaller than protons. Tiny black holes only have large surface gravity, nothing noteworthy at a distance.
After more than a century of speculation, data seem to confirm that Betelgeuse (the brightest star in the Orion constellation, shown here) has a much smaller star as an orbital companion.
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Two independent studies found evidence of a star about the same mass as the sun, orbiting Betelgeuse about once every 2,100 days.
You got it wrong - the poster above is not trying to prove the astronomical phenomenon through a show, the poster is saying that the show itself (called Big Bang) is real. It’s simply a joke.
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