Astrolight Festival Vic Sat 10-Sep-16

[Sol-Skysailor]

https://museumvictoria.com.au/scienceworks/whats-on/astrolight-festival/

Good to see public events featuring astronomy. Not sure if this is the right forum for the topic but just thought it could be of interest especially for families.

Regards
Sol

[Southskyscience]

Hi All, Here's a report from Barry Clark, member ASV, with his kind permission:

"...
Last Saturday I was a volunteer telescope operator at the AstroLight festival at Scienceworks. Apart from the rain until 9 pm, the SW arena was plagued by horrible spotlights, other bad lighting and a supposedly arty clear balloon thing with thousands of LEDs all over it changing colour while big speakers pumped out whale sounds or whatever it was.

All that could be seen with the telescopes was a few bright objects. I found that the attendees got a big kick out of looking directly at all the bright lights and the arty thing through my old Hilger transmission grating. For most it was just pretty colours but for maybe 30% of viewers, they were sufficiently interested for me to tell them that this was how we could tell what the stars were made of.

Total attendance at the festival was about 2000. I suppose I dealt with about a hundred of them, so maybe 30 of them learnt something basic about astronomical spectroscopy. How long would it take to get to 30% of the 4 million people in Melbourne? Even if the astronomy-interested people were only 1% of that to start with, that still represents a potential audience of 40 000 and maybe 13000 who would think about more than rainbows. Clearly the issue needs to be pursued through the mass media."


That was great news about the 30 people!
That gave us strength to soldier on and serve the 30%
(As a bonus, one of the number might go on to make another "small step".)
Regards
Team
(Team Southskyscience)