Last week (August 2-4, with optional teacher workshop held July 31 - August 1) was the annual meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) held at the beautiful University of Colorado at Boulder. This year's theme was "Making Connections in Education and Public Outreach" and was held alongside the ASP's Cosmos in the Classroom meeting, usually held every 3 years, and cohosted by the Geological Society of America. The image on the right is the poster that was presented by Rachel Ross (click to view larger), giving an update on where LCOGT is in terms of building and deploying telescopes and what users can expect to see now and in the future.
On theme that has been running through the last couple years of meetings is using social media to connect users all over the world. With Twitter, Facebook, iPhones, blogs, etc becoming more popular, more groups are using these tools to reach out to communities that they may normally not reach. Want to find a local astronomy club that is part of the Night Sky Network? There is an app for that! How about keeping up with the latest news from the Zooniverse project (home to the popular Galaxy Zoo)? Follow their twitter feed!
With more and more data being collected, the scientists are being overwhelmed and looking for ways to process it in a timely manner. More of these scientists are turning their research into Citizen Science projects, meaning that the data is opened up to a community and they take part in going through it. One of the most popular examples of Citizen Science is Galaxy Zoo, and the rest of the Zooniverse. Seti@home is considered one of the first of the Citizen Science projects, launched in 1999, which uses the publics computers (by use of a special application) to process radio data, looking for certain signatures. With more of these projects popping up, more websites that try to organize them are also coming online. One such example is Science for Citizens, which hosts a large selection of Citizen Science projects spanning many fields, as well as newsletters, videos, blogs, a Facebook page, Twitter account, and more. I encourage you to check it out, there are 15 projects just in the Astronomy & Space category!
Other topics that were discussed were new activities to do in the classroom, ideas for teaching Astro 101, sharing different projects and ideas for the classroom, planetariums, and outreach events, how to work with the 2012 scare and other misconceptions, and lots more. Check out the ASP website (http://astrosociety.org) for more information about these meetings, groups that you may join, resources, and more. This year's meeting will be summarized in the 2010 Conference Procedings and will be available for purchase at the ASP's AstroShop.
And speaking of using social media, check out our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter!
