Outreach
Outreach keeps me grounded. Having to explain my work to a much more general audience forces me to think about the bigger picture rather than getting lost in the details. It also happens to be genuinely fun: the informal, lighthearted atmosphere is a welcome break from the intensity of research, and a good reminder, for the public and for me, that scientists are just curious people like everyone else.
Astronomy Outreach Committee
Outreach Committee Co-Chair
Department of Astronomy, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
As Outreach Co-Chair, I help coordinate and expand the department's public engagement efforts, working to make astronomy accessible to audiences across the broader Champaign-Urbana community and beyond.
- Organize and schedule department outreach events throughout the academic year
- Recruit and coordinate graduate student volunteers for outreach activities
- Facilitate outreach requests from local schools and community organizations such as the Adler Planetarium
- Track event attendance to document the department's outreach reach and growth over time
Events
Adler Planetarium
Volunteer Astronomy Expert in Chicago, IL
Astronomy Conversations
Every 3 months, I join a group of around six UIUC Astronomy grad students for the trip up to Chicago to volunteer at the Adler Planetarium's Astronomy Conversations program. Visitors can ask us anything: what our research is about, what it's like to be an astronomer, or whatever space topic caught their eye that day. We also have a tablet-controlled display with visualizations of phenomena like neutron star mergers, the cosmic microwave background, and galaxy mergers, which helps make some of the more abstract concepts tangible. My favorite part, though, is walking visitors through the Galaxy Zoo, a project which Adler helps run. Visitors classify galaxies as smooth, featured, or not a galaxy at all, corresponding to spiral galaxies, elliptical galaxies, or stars/image artifacts. We then get to explain that their selections are genuinely contributing to science by helping train machine learning models used in real research.
Schools & Libraries
Outreach visits to local schools and public libraries
My favorite demonstration that we run for our school and library visits is an interactive spectroscopy one that shows how astronomers learn what elements distant objects are made of. We start by giving the audience diffraction gratings and having them view an incandescent light bulb through it. They see a rainbow, as the filament inside the bulb is glowing hot with a blackbody spectrum. We then swap the bulb out for a glass tube with a single element, usually neon as its emission lines are particularly bright and vivid, and have them notice that the rainbow has been replaced with only certain colors making lines in a barcode pattern. The neon is then swapped for another element like helium and the audience sees a completely different "barcode". We finish up by explaining how every element has its own unique "barcode" and that astronomers can use this to find out what elements distant stars, planets, and even galaxies are made of. All they have to do is stick a diffraction grating on the end of a telescope and read the barcodes.
STEM Night at Yankee Ridge Multilingual School
With the help of two other Astronomy grad students, I participated in STEM Night at Yankee Ridge Multilingual School in Urbana. Along with the spectroscopy demo, we also set up a model Solar System with planets scaled to the size of our model Sun. However, because the scale distances would still put the outer planets over 100 yards away, we had to scale the distances down by another factor of 10 to fit enough planets in the gymnasium to turn searching for them into a mini scavenger hunt.
The hightlight of the event came near the end of the night. A small group of boys, probably 9 or 10 years old each, came up to our table. However, when I started the same spectra spiel I'd been giving the rest of the night, this time I was met with blank stares. It wasn't until one of them muttered "no hablamos inglés" that I realized what was happening. We had been told ahead of time that we wouldn't need anything other than English for the event, which is why I was caught off guard. I requested "un momento, por favor" from them, drew upon whatever remained of my high school and college Spanish classes, and walked them through the demo without using full sentences: "Todos los colores" for the incandescent bulb's rainbow and "No todos los colores" for the first gas tube. The second gas tube and outro was along the lines of "otros colores. Todos los elementos tienen colores diferentes, y es como los astrónomos aprenden qué elementos están en el sol y otras estrellas." While it wasn't exactly the fluency they had, it was enough to where they left with smiles on their faces.
STEAM Night at Barkstall Elementary
Two other Astronomy grad students and I set up a table at Barkstall Elementary in Savoy, IL for their STEAM (STEM+Arts) Night. In addition to the spectra demo that I was running, one of the other grad students brought an actual meteorite she had that the attendees could pick up and hold. Being essentially a solid lump of iron and nickel, it was deceptively heavy. We also ran a demo on gravity using a sheet of elastic stretched over a hoop that the attendees could roll marbles across. We then put a heavier marble in the middle to show how massive objects distort spacetime and how that changes the trajectory of the marbles. The kids were enthusiastic throughout, but the most memorable moment of the night actually came from one of the parents. One of the students' fathers clearly had a physics background, as he started asking more technical questions about the differences between the broad spectrum the bulb was producing and the emission lines the gas was producing. Having been in the "barcodes and rainbows" mindset for the previous hour or so, it took me a few seconds to shift gears back into "blackbodies and orbitals" before I was able to answer his questions. It provided a funny little dose of variety in an already fun night of wowing people with astronomy.
Jump! Into Science at the Urbana Free Library
Together with a fellow grad student, I gave a presentation some hands-on demonstrations for elementary school children at the Urbana Free Library. We opened with the spectoscopy demonstration before going through the planets of our Solar System with fun facts and having the kids draw their favorites. We wrapped up by having them physically space themselves out across the room according to their favorite planet, which turned out to be a great way to show just how vast the outer Solar System really is.
Public Stargazing
Telescope events at local parks, farmers markets, and campus observatory open houses
Urbana Science at the Market
Twice every Summer I set up telescopes with 3 to 5 other UIUC Astronomers at the local Urbana Farmers Market. We attach solar filters to allow guests to see sunspots safely. We also set up other displays like a scale model of planet sizes with a list of their scale distance from the Sun, as well as some stickers for kids. We also are more than happy to chat about anything space related, from what we work on for our research to whatever the latest astronomy news is.
Stargazing at Local Parks
Multiple times a year I travel to Allerton Park and Middle Fork River Forest Preserve (an International Dark Sky Park) with other UIUC Astronomers to help run public stargazing and telescope events. We set up and allow the attendees to look through our 8" Dobsonian Telescopes and stare at the planets and stars under some of the most pristine skies in the country. One of the best moments I've had while outreaching was when an ~8 year old girl saw Saturn through one of these telescopes and screamed with joy. It had risen above the horizon just in time before we had to pack up, and hearing her so happy to see the planet filled my heart (it's both of our favorite).
UIAS Astronomy Open House: Ask an Astronomer
I've twice given talks at the historic University of Illinois Observatory during the University of Illinois Astronomical Society's Astronomy Open House as part of their Ask an Astronomer program. The talks were on the lifecycles of stars, covering their births to their deaths. Audience members tended to be curious undergrads with no astronomy background, though the second talk drew a broader crowd thanks to better weather. Each talk was slideshow-based but with a strong emphasis on audience questions even if they send us on a tangent. After the talks I was told by multiple audience members how, despite covering a huge topic in stellar evolution in a couple hours, they were still able to follow along easily.
Special Events
One-of-a-kind events and large-scale public astronomy experiences
Total Eclipse of the Park, 2024
For the May 2024 Solar Eclipse, I traveled with 11 other UIUC astronomers to Marion, IL to Mountain Dew Park, home of the Thrillville Thrillbillies Prospect League baseball team. We set up several solar telescopes and provided astronomy expertise to a crowd of over 1500 fellow eclipse viewers. As a passionate astronomer and baseball fan, a day of talking astronomy and baseball while witnessing a surreal once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event such as a total solar eclipse was the most fun I've possibly ever had. Guests asked us about our research, eclipses, the many sunspots they saw through the telescopes. The ones who noticed my Mets hat also chatted baseball with me periodically. Yes, I also ran the bases.
