Communicating Astronomy in Athens!
Sarah Roberts and Paul Roche attended the “Communicating Astronomy to the Public” conference last week in Athens. This conference was co-organized by the National Observatory of Athens and the Eugenides Planetarium, and hosted by the Eugenides Planetarium. Over 200 astronomy researchers and educators attended this meeting, which was the third in a series arranged by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) commission 55 (“Communicating Astronomy to the Public”) – previous meetings were held in Tenerife (2002) and Munich (2005).
The focus of this conference was the rapidly approaching “International Year of Astronomy”, to be held in 2009, but the topics covered included a wide range of schools and public programmes from around the globe. LCOGTN was well represented, with two posters (Sarah and Rachel Ross, from the Santa Barbara HQ of LCOGTN) and a talk by Paul. Webcasts of all the presentations should be available at the CAP2007 website from Weds. 17th October).
The new LCOGT network plans attracted much attention, as the educational network will be partially in place as IYA2009 starts. Paul and Sarah were able to talk to several groups who are already working with small telescope networks (notably in Spain and the Ukraine), and we hope to be able to work with them in the future and learn from their experiences in working with 0.4m telescopes.
A particular highlight was to have David Malin, the world-famous astrophotographer, compliment us on the quality of the images being produced by the project.
The next CAP meeting has been proposed for October 2008, just prior to IYA2009, in South Africa.
For more information about the conference, and to view the webcasts, visit the website here:
