U.S. Activities for the International Year of Astronomy 2009 Aim to Inspire, Inform and Help Everyone Do What Galileo Did
Audio and Video links at bottom
The United States is leading several cornerstone activities for the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009), toward the overall goal of enabling every citizen to experience a taste of the thrilling discoveries made by Galileo Galilei and numerous other scientists around the globe over the past four centuries.
Key IYA2009 cornerstone projects being led in the U.S. include a new low-cost telescope kit, a variety of activities to increase public awareness about the social and economic value of dark skies, a pre-packaged exhibition of the most beautiful astronomical images of the Universe, numerous creative online programs, and supporting materials for amateur astronomers and educators.
“Four-hundred years after Galileo’s first glimpse of the night sky through a telescope, astronomy is in a golden age, with amazing new technologies being deployed by astronomers to foster an explosion of knowledge about the Universe,” said Catherine Cesarsky, president of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the central organizer of IYA2009. “It is this sense of discovery and awe that astronomers wish to share with the public all over the world in 2009. More than 135 countries will take part in activities related to IYA2009, with the United States playing a particularly important role in the creation of global activities.”
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) and NASA have both established liaisons to IYA2009. More than 150 people across the U.S. astronomical outreach community have given their time and energy to organize a basic framework of activities and useful products. The U.S. program committee for IYA2009 includes representatives from Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico to help form a consistent program across North America.
The U.S. program will kick off the year with a public opening event at the winter meeting of the AAS in Long Beach, California, on January 6, 2009, featuring a ribbon-cutting ceremony triggered with 400-year-old light from a distant star cluster. The event will take place at the Long Beach Convention Center in Exhibit Hall B, starting at 7:45 p.m. PST. 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) 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 large museum-sized image of a galaxy taken by NASA’s Great Observatories (hubblesource.stsci.edu/events/iya) 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 (www.ala.org/visionsoftheuniverse) 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.
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.
The Astronomical Society of the Pacific is a primary partner in the U.S. IYA2009 program. The ASP led the development of monthly Discovery Guides on the featured sky objects of IYA2009 (www.astrosociety.org/iya/guides.html), and is building a “cosmic clearinghouse” of materials, Web links and hands-on activities for formal and informal astronomy education, including a central role in the IYA2009 cornerstone Galileo Teacher Training Program.
A foundation of the planned U.S. program for IYA2009 are 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 for more details.
A project to create and distribute a new high-quality low-cost telescope kit called the Galileoscope is preparing to accept orders soon at www.galilescope.org after expressions of interest from around the world.
A variety of dark-skies awareness programs and related “citizen-science” activities—covering including both optical light and radio wavelengths—are being planned by an active group involving observatories, the International Dark-Sky Association, the Astronomical League, and the National Park Service, including the networks of the ASP: see www.darkskiesawareness.org.
Another citizen-science project led by the U.S. will ask the public to monitor changes in the brightness of a very bright star named Epsilon Aurigae and analyze their own data. This star mysteriously becomes dim every 27 years and is actually too bright for most professional astronomical telescopes.
IYA2009 has been endorsed by the United Nations, UNESCO and the U.S. Congress. Other cornerstone activities include efforts to bring astronomy to developing nations and to increase the representation of female and minority scientists in the field.
Much more information on IYA2009 can be found at www.astronomy2009.us, astronomy2009.nasa.gov and www.astronomy2009.org.
The U.S. IYA2009 program is supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA, and by private donations. Other key U.S. partners include the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
Video 1: Inside perspective view of the Early Universe Portal of the SL implementation of the real life project From Earth to the Universe. Images of galaxies and globular clusters rise out of a murky soup of particles. [.mov, 3.4 MB]
Video 2: The ’solar nebula’ portal in the From Earth to the Universe implementation in Second Life (R) serves out images of solar system objects in a swirl of activity. [.mov, 2.2 MB]
Audio: 365 Days of Astronomy Introduction Audio [.aif, 78 MB] [.mp3, 4.7 MB]
Media Contacts:
Douglas Isbell
U.S. Single-Point-of-Contact for IYA2009
Phone: 520-991-0380
Email: dougisbell@astronomy2009.us
Andrea Schweitzer
U.S. Project Manager for IYA2009
Phone: 970-691-4747
Email: aschweitzer@astronomy2009.us
