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I love participating in as many outreach events as I can, as it helps remind me to see the big picture in the work I do and allows me to talk for hours about my favorite topic: space. This normally takes the form of stargazing nights at local parks but also includes visiting children at local libraries, solar eclipse events, and even the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.
For the Spring 2024 North American Eclipse, I went with a contingent of ~15 grad students, postdocs, and faculty to Mtn Dew Park in Marion, IL, home of the Thrillville Thrillbillies independent-league baseball team. We set up a few telescopes (with appropriate solar filters) and talked astronomy (and baseball) with the over 1200 attendees, who ranged from small children to senior citizens. Most of the discussion obviously centered around what a solar eclipse was and why they’re so rare, but there was also lots of fun explaining what suspots were and why they were visible through the telescopes while waiting for totality. When totality came, it became surreal as the sky turned dark and all of the animals became absolutely silent. That silence was broken when the crowd started hollering and cheering.
Every few months or so, some of the other grad students and I make the 2.5 hour drive up to the Adler Planetarium in Chicago to participate in their Astronomy Conversations program. This allows any member of the public who is visiting the Planetarium to talk to real astronomers about anything about space that interests them. The conversations mostly are about the exhibit they liked the most, but I’ve also had high schoolers ask me how to go about being an astronomer, helped kids identify galaxies as part of the Galaxy Zoo Project, and helped adults cope with the feeling of insignifacance of man when compared to the vastness of the cosmos.
I’ve also done multiple outreach events at local parks where skies are wonderfully dark. These include Allerton Park and Middle Fork River Forest Preserve, the latter of which is a Dark Sky International-recognized International Dark Sky Park. These events are largely attended by children and their parents, and they get to look through our telescopes at whatever happens to be in the sky that night, though we typically focus on planets, the moon, and Andromeda. My favorite moment of any outreach I’ve done so far came from one of these events at Middle Fork, where a girl screamed with joy as Saturn (our favorite planet) got just high enough above the treeline for me to get a telescope pointed at it before the event concluded.
I’ve also participated in the Urbana Free Library’s Jump Into Science! program. Working with another grad student, we talk to local elementary school kids about the solar system. We started with the sun, using diffraction gratings and gas lights to show the kids how scientists know what the sun is made of. We then talked about each of the planets individually, throwing in cool facts about each of them (Mercury’s almost entirely made of its core, Vesus is hotter than Mercury, Mars is the only planet we know of inhabited entirely by robots, etc.) before letting the kids draw their favorite planet on a foam ball and lining them up accoring to their relative distance from the Sun.
One other event I participate in is a stand at the local Urbana Farmers Market. Each week, one science group from the Champaign-Urbana area sets up in a booth and talks to the visitors to the market about what they do. For our event, we set up telescopes (again with solar filters) to let them peer through. We also have a model solar systems with a chart of their scaled distances from the Sun (i.e. Pluto would be 1.8 miles from the market) as well as some souviners like posters and stickers for them to take home.