Public Ceremony to Kick Off the U.S. Program for the International Year of Astronomy 2009 in Long Beach on January 6
The U.S. astronomical community will kick off a year-long celebration of astronomy and its contributions to society and culture by using 400-year-old light from a distant star cluster to trigger a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the International Year of Astronomy 2009. The public event will take place at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Long Beach, California, on January 6, 2009.
The International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009) commemorates the 400th anniversary of the first scientific use of a telescope by Galileo Galilei. More than 135 countries are preparing activities for IYA2009, which has been endorsed by the United Nations, UNESCO and the U.S. Congress.
The U.S. IYA2009 opening ceremony will take place at the Long Beach Convention Center on Tuesday, January 6, in Exhibit Hall B, starting at 7:45 p.m. PST. The public is encouraged to attend, and the ceremony will be broadcast live on the World Wide Web at www.ustream.tv/channel/us-iya-opening-ceremony.
The ceremony will feature a virtual “ribbon cutting” of the IYA2009 presence in the online community Second Life (www.secondastronomy.org). This action will be initiated using light from the Pleiades star cluster sent over the Web from the Cincinnati Observatory, via the world’s oldest telescope still in nightly use by the general public. Light from this famous star cluster (also known as the “Seven Sisters”) takes approximately 400 years to reach Earth. Therefore, the photons of light to be viewed on January 6 were emitted around the time Galileo first looked through his telescope to see—among other things—mountains and craters on the Moon, the four biggest moons of Jupiter, and countless faint stars in the Pleiades invisible to the unaided eye.
Other highlights of the ceremony include the unveiling of a museum wall-sized image of a galaxy taken by NASA’s Great Observatories and a live performance of the official theme song for the IYA2009 “365 Days of Astronomy” podcast (www.365daysofastronomy.org). A sample of beautiful astronomy images from the international IYA2009 cornerstone exhibit project “From Earth to the Universe” (www.fromearthtotheuniverse.org) and colorful panels from NASA’s Visions of the Universe exhibit for libraries will be on display.
The ceremony will conclude with the world premiere of a new high-definition PBS television documentary by Interstellar Studios, “400 Years of the Telescope, A Journey of Science, Technology and Thought,” which was filmed at dozens of the world’s greatest observatories (www.400years.org).
Celestron (www.celestron.com), a global sponsor of IYA2009, has generously donated a NexStar® 130SLT computerized telescope and a SkyScout® Personal Planetarium®/SkyScout Scope bundle to be raffled off during the opening ceremony. SkyScout has been declared an “Official Product” of IYA2009. Celestron will also provide small telescopes for public viewing of the Moon and other bright objects before and after the U.S. opening ceremony, outside the convention center starting at approximately 6:30 p.m.
The U.S. IYA2009 opening event was made possible in part by a contribution from Microsoft Research, inventor of the WorldWide Telescope (www.worldwidetelescope.org). With well over one million users to date, WorldWide Telescope has been embraced by the astronomical and education communities as a compelling astronomical resource for students and lifelong learners.
Key elements of the planned U.S. program for IYA2009 include hundreds of grassroots star parties and local events (including a focus on the first weekend of April 2009 as the “100 Hours of Astronomy”- see www.100hoursofastronomy.org), a new high-quality low-cost telescope kit called the Galileoscope (www.galileoscope.org), a variety of dark-skies awareness activities (www.darkskiesawareness.org) and citizen-science campaigns, and IYA2009 Discovery Guides related to monthly highlighted sky objects (www.astrosociety.org/iya/guides.html).
Much more information on IYA2009 can be found at www.astronomy2009.us and www.astronomy2009.org.
The U.S. IYA2009 program is supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA, and by private donations. The American Astronomical Society is the U.S. liaison to the IYA2009 program via the International Astronomical Union. Key U.S. partners include the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
Media Contacts:
Douglas Isbell
U.S. Single-Point-of-Contact for IYA2009
Phone: 520-991-0380
Email: dougisbell@hotmail.com
Andrea Schweitzer
U.S. Project Manager for IYA2009
Phone: 970-691-4747
Email: aschweitzer@astronomy2009.us
