Closing Thoughts on GAM 2014
And here we are at the end of GAM2014. GAM is now in its 5th year and I am honoured to be part of something so special. This is my first year coordinating GAM and it has been an amazing experience. This April we have been blessed with a plethora of astronomical events - the Lyrid meteor shower , solar and lunar eclipses, Mars in opposition and at its closest approach to Earth and Vesta in opposition . It has been a very exciting month for astronomers! Images of the total lunar eclipse compiled by the Virtual Telescope GD Goenka...
IAU astroEDU: an open-access platform for peer-reviewed astronomy education activities
There are many sources of educational resources for astronomy across the world. The quality of these resources is highly variable making the effectiveness to the end-user an unknown quantity. They are not maintained or updated regularly and have a limited content review. To address these issues and more, a group of experts with the help of the community launched astroEDU. What is astroEDU? astroEDU makes the best astronomy activities accessible to educators around the world. astroEDU is an open-access platform for peer-reviewed astronomy education activities. astroEDU is a platform for educators to discover, review, distribute, improve, and remix educational astronomy...
Universe in a Box: a Global Educational Resource
Our international team, Leiden University’s Universe Awareness, will launch an exciting Kickstarter campaign in one week to raise funds for sharing astronomy education resources with communities around the world. This is the next step in the highly successful Universe in a Box project and aims to expand the network for this dynamic and collaborative educational resource. Children across the globe find space the most interesting school topic but educators often lack the resources and training to engage kids in this exciting subject. Universe in a Box is a physical toolbox for teachers and educators that makes teaching astronomy and space...
Making Memories: Supporting Astronomy Outreach
I received my first pair of glasses in second grade, and I remember looking up one night to see the stars for the very first time. I wondered, have those always been there? Many people have stories about how they first came to love astronomy, and fortunately that was just the first of several for me. Fast forward a year or two and I was watching the Perseids rain down in dark, northern-Minnesota skies. Some time later Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smacked into Jupiter, an event that made front-page news worldwide. Later still I would watch Comet Hale-Bopp blaze in the...
Solar Eclipse Education in the Faroe Islands
A total solar eclipse is arguably the most amazing natural sight one can ever witness. During this precise alignment of the Earth, Moon and Sun, anyone lucky enough to be situated in the path of the Moon's shadow will observe daylight turn to an eerie twilight darkness for a brief few minutes. During totality, the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, becomes visible as a brilliant greyish-gold colour, shimmering behind the Moon, a now stark black silhouette. The chromosphere - the Sun's inner atmospheric layer - glows pink from Hydrogen-alpha emission around the lunar limb. Animals will behave like it's dawn/dusk,...
