Podcaster: Eva Ntormousi
Title: GalileoMobile: Under the same sky
Organization: Galileo Mobile
Link : www.galileo-mobile.org
Description: This podcast describes GalileoMobile, an itinerant science education project for elementary and secondary school students. GalileoMobile brings Astronomy closer to young people around the world by visiting their schools and performing experiments and sky observations with them and their teachers. Our experiments and hands-on activities are designed to be fun and use only cheap materials. Also, we prefer to visit places that have not participated in any outreach project before. So far we have travelled to Brasil, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Uganda and India and on October 14th we are starting our new adventure in Bogota, Colombia. We hope you enjoy this podcast and follow us for more news!
Bio: Eva Ntormousi originally from Thessaloniki, Greece where she received my Physics degree and did her PhD at the Max-Planck for Extraterrestrial Physics and received my title from the Ludwig-Maximillians University of Munich. Right now, Eva is a a post-doc at CEA Saclay, near Paris, doing theoretical research on interstellar turbulence and molecular clouds. She was in the founding team of GalileoMobile and worked on the project from 2008 to 2010, mainly on the activities and the production of the documentary. She rejoined this year and will be participating in the Colombia expedition starting next week.
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Transcript:
What is it about the sky that inspires us all so much?
For millennia, people across the planet have looked up at the stars and wondered about their nature, their meaning and their role in our lives. These tiny dots on the sky, together with the Sun and the Moon have influenced art, religion and philosophy all throughout history. Eventually, human awe and curiosity about the sky gave birth to the science of Astronomy.
Astronomy is of interest to everyone because it deals with the essence of what we are and how we came to be. It does so by studying the Universe around us, through experiment, detailed modeling and observations. Nowadays, all this means employing large telescopes and expensive supercomputers, and scientific results have become very complex. In fact, they are sometimes so technical that new knowledge moves outside the grasp of people who lack very specific training.
What is the purpose of discovering the wonders of the Universe, if we cannot share and discuss them with everyone?
GalileoMobile is a project with exactly that purpose: to share our views about the sky, and this is what I am going to talk about in this podcast today.
2009 was the International Year of Astronomy, celebrating 400 years since the founder of modern Astronomy, Galileo Galilei, pointed a telescope to the sky and started observing celestial objects. That year, a group of astronomy graduate students and science communicators were inspired by this opportunity to start building a bridge between professional astronomy and young people in remote areas.
In 2009 GalieoMobile started its first journey in the Andes high plateau, passing through Chile, Bolivia and Peru and stopping in small villages along the way. We visited many schools and conducted experiments and observations of the sky with the school children, their teachers and sometimes, the whole local community. Under the breath-taking beauty of the southern sky at an altitude of more than 3000 meters, we met people from all walks of life, discussed our view of the Universe as scientists and heard their stories and theories about the sky.
When we returned from that trip, full of images and memories of fascinating places, we thought we would not be given such a chance again.
But the project flourished since then. We have visited India, Uganda, and Bolivia since, and less than two months ago we completed our last expedition to Brasil and again, Bolivia. Starting October 10th and for three weeks we will be in Bogota, in Colombia, to work with schools at the outskirts of the city.
Since many times we visit schools with very limited resources, the main guideline of our activities has always been that they require only everyday materials. The more expensive or complex equipment, like a telescope, we donate to the schools we visit. It is so rewarding to see the joy in someone’s eyes when, for the first time, they discover that, not only can the questions they have about Nature be answered, but also, that they can design an experiment to test or illustrate their idea and execute it themselves.
Our activities aim at inspiring this kind of thinking.
For example, one of our most popular activities with younger children, is “the Earth as a peppercorn”. In this experiment, the Solar System is scaled down so as to represent Earth, well, as a peppercorn! Children are asked to guess how far away planets are from each other and how big or small they are with respect to the Sun or the Earth. When we finally quote the answer, we have to all walk to the location of the next planet and place it there. If we have to walk 25 steps from the Sun to place the Earth, can you imagine how far we have to go to place Neptune? The answers always create a wave of reactions, questions and discussions.
And it leaves children with a view of our Solar System’s dimensions that is very hard to forget!
It is an excitement we professional scientists get to experience every day, but sharing it is a rare occasion, even when doing outreach.
One might ask, why travel? The answer is, we don’t just do these journeys to teach! We are out there also to learn, to listen to the local tales and myths about the sky from voices ancient and modern. In South America, we discovered the richness of Aymara and Inca Astronomy. In India we heard tales about the sky wrapped in beautiful colors. In Uganda, we listened to the names of the stars in tens of languages and dialects, like music to the ears.
The more diverse our cultures, the more intense the bond we make! Picture a ceremony by a shaman, late at night, where he asks permission from the Mother Earth, where he asks for clear skies for our observations. Everyone waits in respectful silence around the fire and listen… and after this ceremony, the astronomers can assemble their telescopes and discuss science. And children run around, they play and they look through the telescopes. This image, I believe, shows everything GalileoMobile is about. And it takes you back to the origins of astronomy, when people told tales and prayed together around a campfire.
Of course, sometimes it is not the road that takes you to a journey, it is just a mental step, a change of point of view. We had an opportunity during our last visit to Bolivia to perform activities with visually impaired people. Imagine how difficult it must be to show someone the Sun if they cannot see. In the beginning it seemed impossible to avoid our usual optical perception of the sky! But tactile activities permitted us the rare chance to discuss the constellations, the stars and the planets with people not contaminated by any visual pre-conception.
What a unique point of view for an astronomer! One might say, those would be the ultimate theorists. Such experiences help us show what we know to others, but they also help us grow beyond our expectations.
So you see, with each journey we become richer and we want to share that too. We record each experience in documentaries, each as unique as our memories from each place. The first documentary, called “Under the same sky” is available on our website, www.galileo-mobile.org and is free of charge. Our second documentary “In the land of beauty”, filmed in Uganda, will be available very soon. We invite you to visit our webpage and follow us on Facebook or Twitter for more news!
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by Astrosphere New Media. Audio post-production by Richard Drumm. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast with a few dollars (or Euros!). Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. In the new year the 365 Days of Astronomy project will be something different than before….Until then…goodbye