World Record Astronomy

Last year, I organised a school community to do something amazing. I organised over 200 people to participate in and break a world record, do some fundraising for the school community, have a fun night out and do some astronomy! Amazing on all counts!

The event was a part of a world record attempt run by Dr Brad Tucker and the people at Mt Stromlo for the most people stargazing at one time across different locations.

We smashed it by the way! A total of 7960 participants . 114 of those contributed by me and the wonderful people of my kids’ school community! A small but very important contribution.

This event was one of my highlights from last year and from that success, I’ve been asked to do it again, and I’m really considering it! The was so much happening on the night, we had dinner prepared by the Parent & Citizens to raise some money for the school, We had 2 lectures by our resident Scientist in School about astronomy & planets, we had a couple of episodes of COSMOS by Neil DeGrasse Tyson playing, we had a Starlab (a mobile planetarium) and of course the main event, a world record attempt at stargazing. To complete the night, a few families even stayed back on the school grounds and had a campout! Wonderful! It was a to to pack into a few hours and it was a lot of fun!

Some highlights included:

• Breaking the world record!
• The parting of the clouds right when we needed to start our times world record attempt. The sky was very cloudy for the entire night but right 8:30 when the 10 minute viewing window was happening, the clouds parted to reveal the moon and a single star. I couldn’t place the star as there was no other star available to locate it, but it was pretty bright so it might have been Sirius.
• The talks and the Starlab. Such a hit and a great intro into some really exciting astronomy.
• Getting a call from an amateur astronomy group the day before asking if he could bring their 16” Dobsonian. My answer was yes, and Wow! It was a huge telescope!
• Getting to talk to over 200 students and parents for more than 3 hours about. astronomy, planets, stars, galaxies, the big bang etc. I love talking about this stuff, and on this occasion, and to this day, everyone wanted to join in.
• After the event, I calculated that the viewing area of all the telescopes that we had on the night, was more than double the size of the Hubble Space Telescope

The coolest part of the event though, was when I did the countdown to 8:30, our start time. I counted down from 10 and in between numbers 7 and 6, I thought to myself, "I've just organised for over 200 people to do something science-y that they would normally never do, all at once, ON PURPOSE!" Such a great moment. I could barely contain my excitement! I was like a little kid with a telescope looking up at the moon and the stars for the first time.

Apart from smashing the world record, the stargazing night was a huge win for astronomy communication and science. People will remember this night for a long time, and a few of the students will remember the excitement when they’re about 15 and deciding which subjects they want to do in school. A huge number of students are now more comfortable talking about astronomy and still use their small telescope to look at the stars in their own time. For pure levels of engagement, I don’t think I’ve been a part of, or helped organise a more successful single science communication event. I encourage everyone to host a viewing night for a school, community, group of friends, local amateur astronomy society etc. A viewing night is a great example of astronomy communication at its best. If you need help, I can let you know more about how we did it. When you do run your own event, let me know, I’ll do what I can to join you!

I am officially inviting and challenging everyone to break our world record. It’ll be really tough to do, but I’d love to see you try!

Whats the lesson?

Things I learnt from today.

I was at the science rewired Big Science Communication Summit today and have a few thoughts and comments about the sessions, speakers and conversations. Heres my top 3:

1. Collaboration. This sort of implies that we dont have to go about all this by ourselves. My job is science communicator, but that doesn't mean I have to do it all. I've been worried about this a little bit lately. I used to think that there are heaps of people better at scicomm than me, but I've now realised that instead of being better, they are complimentary to what i do and what we all do. We can't do it all by ourselves, and neither should we be expected to. I'm a big supporter of collaboration. We tell students all the time that scientists collaborate. So...we are scientists, we should collaborate more!

2. Social Media. This one gets thrown around a lot and it worries me that we keep talking about it but not a lot seems to be done. It is very hard ot have a social media presence in a place like a University that has a brand, guidelines, etc. I dont think we should force people to get into social media. As an ex-teacher, I can tell you that as soon as you tell someone what is cool and what they should be doing, it is instantly UN-cool and not worth doing. We shouldn't make people tweet, we shouldn't even make Universities tweet, or blog. What we should do is embrace their voice if they do. There are a number of excellent social media savvy people that I work with, and their following is far greater than any institution could drum up. I don't think we should be afraid of that. Social media should be organic. People can tell when places like universities try too hard.

3. This sentence "what happened to climate science can happen to any other form of science." - Alvin Stone. This got me right in the feels. We have to be careful and we have to be good. The graph that showed perceived trends from scientists and non scientists was a great illustration, imo, of what we were all talking about today (and I'll post it here when I find it). I love graphs, and I love it that it was a graph that floored me.

What I expected to see was a bit more coverage of research based science communication. To fully advance our field of scicomm as a science, we should embrace scicomm research, which we do I think, I just didn't see much of it today, maybe I wasn't paying attention!

In addition, I got to see some old friends and chin wag for a little bit, make some new friends and even a little bit of professional networking. Finally, the great day was finished up by some wonderful cuddles by my family and a yummy lasagne dinner! A great day, looking forward to tomorrow.