OPTICKS and Moonbounce Technology
By Daniela De Paulis
Since starting my collaboration with Astronomers Without Borders in 2010, my work as an artist has changed, shifting from a mostly studio-based practice, to an interdisciplinary and global venture. My current work involves international collaborations with astronomers, radio astronomers, neuroscientists and people from all walks of life. It is amazing for me to help organising every year the art programme for Global Astronomy Month and to present my project OPTICKS to a worldwide audience. Thanks to my collaboration with AWB, OPTICKS has developed into an international event, during which we send to the Moon and back images submitted by our world wide community, turning each event into a unique experience.
This year OPTICKS was truly special: I invited playwright/director Ione to participate for a homage to her life partner and noted composer Pauline Oliveros. I have been long inspired by Oliveros's work and her experimental pioneering approach to sound and music. In 1987, Oliveros staged for the first time the performance 'Echoes from the Moon', at the end of which she had people queuing to speak to the Moon and back via a phone line, using the Moonbounce technology. Oliveros and Ione repeated the performance several times throughout the years, always drawing great enthusiasm from the participants. For GAM 2018, I asked Ione if she would be interested in collaborating in attempting to re-create the excitement of 'Echoes from the Moon' by having members of our global community tuning in for a few minutes during our live online show and speak to the Moon and back. Ione thought the idea was wonderful and accepted the technical challenges posed by the experiment. For 'OPTICKS/Echoes from the Moon', we had a fantastic international panel, featuring Ione, our very own Andrew Fazekas and Jessica Santascoy, Scot- Gresham Lancaster, a long term collaborator of Ione and Pauline Oliveros, Jan van Muilwijk, my collaborator in all my OPTICKS endeavors, radio astronomer Roy Smits, myself and Tanguy Roussel, a student of mine from the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris. Together we had a flowing conversation about art, science, the Moon, the technical challenges required to perform each of these events using Moonbounce in real time. As always, we presented the programme from the cabin of the Dwingeloo radio telescope in The Netherlands, a 25 metres dish that can receive very strong echoes from the Moon. After reflecting off the Moon the wonderful images submitted by friends and people from all over the world, we opened the panel to our online community, with people entering the 'virtual' room on FB live from the US, India and Malaysia to say a brief sentence to the Moon and hear the echo of their voices. At the end of the show, Ione performed her poem 'Moon, Mond, Luna, Lune' which created a poignant meditative silence in our panel discussion. We are looking forward to presenting 'OPTICKS/Echoes from the Moon' again in the near future, in collaboration with Ione and Scot and with the virtual presence of Pauline and her intense pursue for experimentation.
Moonbounced photo with Pauline Oliveros (Credit: IONE)
How Much Can the Moon's Craters Tell Us?
By Tilly Evans
Crater CountingThe Moon has been there for as long as we can remember, but how do we find out how old it really is? The age of the Moon’s surface can be estimated by counting its craters. These craters are from impacts from asteroids or comets that have smashed into the Moon’s surface. Younger surfaces will have less impacts and therefore less craters whereas older surfaces would have more using the same logic. There is, however, a limit to the aging of these surfaces using this process as there is a limited amount of space for impacts to hit. Once the surface is completely covered in craters it’s hard to tell how long it has been that way and more impacts land in old craters. |
Crater on the Moon. Credit: NASA |
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Variation in the number of craters formed on the Moon's surface during different periods of time shows that the cratering rate has not been constant but has decreased dramatically from pre-Imbrian times (over 4,000 million years ago) to present. The most dramatic decline occurred ~4 billion years ago. Most impacts occurred during the Hadean epoch (4-4.5 billion years ago). Size vs quantityIf the number of craters is plotted against size the resulting graph shows that there are actually three different aged surfaces on the Moon. When astronauts went to the Moon they collected samples from each of these regions for absolute dating of the rocks in these areas, which helps geologists to piece together the Moon’s history. The calibration can then be applied to crater counting on Mars, Mercury, etc. to calculate the age of their surfaces. Impact Simulator ActivityThe size and depth of the Moons craters can tell us a lot about the impacting object. The density of the object as well as its speed and impacting angle can be calculated. Once the trajectory and speed are known, its possible to work out the origin of the impacting object. If the same object hit the Earth and Moon with the same density, size, trajectory and speed they would have very different outcomes due to the difference in gravity. You can find out how these factors affect the size of the craters produced using the impact simulator produced as a part of Down2Earth by the Faulkes Telescope Project. |
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Tilly is this year's Global Astronomy Month blog coordinator. She is an undergraduate student in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University. During the summer break in 2017, she undertook a placement in Cardiff University with Faulkes Telescope producing educational resources for schools.
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AWB’s Building on the Eclipse Program Inspires Americans to Continue Learning About Light
By Lindsay Bartolone
Building on the excitement of the Total Solar Eclipse in the summer of 2017, AWB’s US based education program, invited educators from all settings to participate in a series of lessons, professional development workshops and culminating events. These experiences helped them explore and learn from light alongside students of all ages.
AWB was aware of many groups helping to prepare for the eclipse, so we looked for areas to build upon existing resources. These areas included building an online platform where resources including lesson plans and professional development webinars were linked, searchable and curated. AWB provided glasses where needed. We designed a crowdfunding platform to help groups (without the funding to purchase glasses) raise the needed support in their communities. We offered a way to connect educators with amateur and professional astronomers to form partnerships for the eclipse and beyond.
We also provided Professional Development and support after the eclipse. We chose to organize the resources and final projects about learning from light. This allowed us to tie together the natural phenomenon of the eclipse with broader topics interesting to clubs and nature centers while supporting educational standards across the country. We wanted to be able to appeal to many groups, while meeting the needs of the educators who had already begun to register for the program. We set goals to reach underserved communities and provide quality resources to any interested educator.
One of those resources was the foldable spectroscope previously designed and distributed by Stanford Solar Center. Many members of our team had used these with our educator and student communities and knew what a useful tool they could be to explore light. As a part of this project, AWB can now provide these spectroscopes for a discounted price and has crowd-funding templates to assist educators in providing these to their students.
We provided descriptions of culminating projects and events to motivate the investigations for students and other groups. However, we remained open to educator choices for these projects. We intended for teachers and students to share the results of these projects through online presentations with each other and we plan to invite notable guests to provide feedback.
We had 220 educators complete registration forms, the majority of whom were formal educators. They came from all over the country and estimated they would use the resources compiled by AWB with large audiences (See chart)
There is a high proportion of underserved schools represented in the program as measured by the percentage of students on free or reduced-price lunch programs. The median percentage of students enrolled in free and reduced lunch is 70%, and one quarter of the schools have 90% or more in these programs. 83% of the educators told us that school would be in session during the eclipse and 99% of them were participating in an AWB program for the first time.
One educator said the program was useful because it was a "one stop shop" of resources” and (s)he enjoyed "knowing I could come ask questions of fellow science teachers and space science experts.” We were encouraged to "keep the resources available. I plan to come back”
It isn’t too late to join our community. Educators are welcome to register and join in on learning from light using the eclipse as inspiration. (Link to reg form https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HMDNHDW)
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Lindsay Bartolone is a Science Education Consultant from Chicago IL. She has been a Co-I on NASA's Science Education and Public Outreach Forum projects in the areas of Astrophysics and Heliophysics. She has led Education and Public Outreach Programs for NASA missions including Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) and Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). She has also served as Director of Education at Adler Planetarium. |
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Moon Village – Global Science Opera
By Álvaro Folhas
The Global Science Opera “Moon Village”, inspired by the European Space Agency’s vision of a village in the Moon. The opera "Moon Village" was created by schools, universities and art institutions in 27 countries. “Moon Village” is about human society on the Moon and begins in the year 2040. A community of scientists, artists, farmers, teachers and engineers live on the Moon Village, and so the first children in space begin to be born. Robi the Robot is their nanny, and while Robi takes care of the babies, Gravity plans to make life difficult for them. As the children grow up, they explore Space and learn about problems on Earth. Some of them decide to return to Earth, but others stay and become more curious about Space, realizing that they need a school on the Moon. The story goes on addressing many interesting points about creative education.
Portuguese participation included musical compositions by students from Silva Monteiro Music Class in Porto and babies from AFA Nursery in Fermentelos.
Acknowledgement: Teresa Direitinho, Oded Ben-Horin, and Rosa Doran, and Thilina Heenatigala.
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Álvaro Folhas teaches Physics and Chemistry in a secondary school and is a member of NUCLIO - Núcleo Interativo de Astronomia, a non-profit association of Astronomy and Education, and NGO for Development. With NUCLIO, Álvaro has participated in many international science teaching projects. He is also a researcher in the fields of Educational Sciences and Didactics of Science and Astronomy and a teacher trainer in these areas. Álvaro uses new teaching approaches with his students, such as the use of telescopes and radio telescopes in real-time and considers that new projects and challenges are essential in science teaching in order to prepare students for the future. |
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Silk Road at Night Exhibition
By Jeff Dai
Silk Road at Night Exhibition in Beijing Planetarium
For over 2000 years, the Silk Road has been connecting the east and west world since the Han Dynasty (207 BCE – 220 CE). Today, the "New Silk Road” turn over a new leaf. With its thousands of miles, the Silk Road is not only the important channel of economy, but also culture exchanges between the Eastern and Western civilizations.
The starry sky is the precious part of nature resources and important culture for human beings. All the people along the Silk Road share the same view of the starry sky for all the time, though the people in different background of culture may have various understandings.
The sky is a bridge between the people around the world, creating friendship and understanding. We are travelling together in a single spaceship named “earth” among the vast ocean of the universe. While there is only one earth in the universe, and mankind has only one homeland, so we must care for and cherish the earth in a community of shared future for mankind.
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"One People, One Sky” and "One People, One Planet". With the purpose of TWAN & AWB, and inspiration of Mike Simmons and Babak Tafreshi, Jeff Dai organized the Silk Road at Night exhibition a series of exhibitions to present the colourful landscapes, historical heritage and the unique starry cultures along the Silk Road. |
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In May and August 2017, the Silk Road at Night exhibition successfully held at Beijing Planetarium and 2017 Astana World EXPO in Kazakstan. You can visit the exhibition via VR: http://www.detu.com/pano/show/220283 and http://news.qq.com/cross/20170511/9P8UHV00.html
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