Podcaster: Dr Jacinta Delhaize and Dr Daniel Cunnama ; Guest: Susan Murabana Owen and Chu Owen
Title: Cosmic Savannah – Ep. 27: The Bamboo Planetarium
Link : www.thecosmicsavannah.com
@cosmicsavannah (twitter, facebook & instagram)
Check out the full show notes at: https://thecosmicsavannah.com/episode-27-a-bamboo-planetarium/
Description:
Dan, and collaborator Sally Macfarlane (University of Cape Town), recently premiered a new full-length planetarium show focusing on South African astronomy. Together, they incorporate aspects of indigenous knowledge, the history of astronomy in the country, and shots of the various locations – all in a full dome experience.
Our featured guests this week are Susan Murabana Owen and Chu Owen. Two astronomers, working in Kenya, passionate about bringing astronomy to everyone, not just those who can afford it. They founded The Travelling Telescope, a social enterprise, in 2014 where Susan serves as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) (she also holds positions as the President of the African Planetarium Society, and serves on the board of the International Planetarium Society), and Chu serves as the Chief Technical Director (CTD) (bringing with a wealth of astrophotography experience).
The Travelling Telescope provides educational tools to aid school teachers, such as a mobile planetarium, a permanent planetarium in Nairobi made of bamboo, a robotics program (partnered with the Airbus Foundation), and virtual reality headsets. Through events hosted, such as the Nairobi star party, they hope to foster sustainable interaction with local communities, and provide a platform for these communities to tell their stories of the African sky.
Bio: Dr Jacinta Delhaize and Dr Daniel Cunnama are astronomers based in Cape Town, South Africa. Jacinta is a Research Fellow at the University of Cape Town. She spends her time using huge radio telescopes to study gas and black holes in distant galaxies. Daniel is the Science Engagement Astronomer at the South African Astronomical Observatory. He likes to use large supercomputers to create simulations of galaxies. Both Jacinta and Daniel love to promote the incredible astronomy happening across the African continent.
Guest: Susan Murabana Owen and Chu Owen
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Transcript:
Dan: [00:00:00] Welcome to The Cosmic Savannah with Dr. Daniel Cunnama.
Jacinta: [00:00:08] And Dr. Jacinta Delhaize. Each episode, we’ll be giving you a behind the scenes look at world-class astronomy and astrophysics happening under African skies.
Dan: [00:00:16] Let us introduce you to the people involved, the technology we use, the exciting work we do, and the fascinating discoveries we make.
Jacinta: [00:00:24] Sit back and relax as we take you on a safari through the skies.
[Music]
Jacinta: [00:00:35] Welcome to episode 27, everyone. Today, we’ll be hearing from Susan Murabana Owen and Chu Owen who run The Travelling Telescope program in Kenya. But first Dan, it has been quite a week!
Dan: [00:00:49] The busiest of weeks.
Jacinta: [00:00:51] I’m not sure how you’re still standing.
Dan: [00:00:53] Well, I’m not, I’m sitting at the moment and that’s been my state for the last few days.
Jacinta: [00:00:59] Alright. Well, before we get into that, this is the first episode we’ve recorded since the announcement of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics,
Dan: [00:01:07] which once again, went to
Jacinta: [00:01:08] Astronomy!!!
Dan: [00:01:10] Obviously, it’s the best science.
Jacinta: [00:01:16] We’ll deny it, if anyone asks. Yeah. So this year, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for “Black holes”.
So Roger Penrose was awarded the prize for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity. So basically some very hardcore maths and physics, astrophysics. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez was awarded the prize for discovering the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky `way.
And that’s called Sagittarius A*.
Dan: [00:01:54] Yeah, that’s pretty cool. I think that the relativity, obviously from Einstein back in 1915 and black holes were the kind of the singularity, which were predicted and now, I mean, we know about black holes, we know all about them. We know that they’re real and that they abide by the law of relativity.
Jacinta: [00:02:16] Yeah, and I guess Genzel discovered the supermassive black hole by tracking the motion of other stars around the centre of the Milky way. And they could see, it was all putting a point where there was no light coming from it. It was discovered that was a black hole.
And I would assume Dan that a lot of the reason why this award is happening this year has something to do with the EHT image of a supermassive black hole that was taken last year, which I guess is really quite direct evidence of black holes.
Dan: [00:02:46] Yeah. I mean I think that black holes are definitely one of the more exciting branches of physics. There’s a lot happening at the moment and there’s a lot to be discovered.
I’m not sure if it was related to the EHT or not, but that observation that you’re talking about, it’s like the coolest gift ever. Because it’s like, 20 or 30 years now of observations of these stars going around the black hole. We’ll definitely stick that on the website, but you know, you can see these little black stars going “whoop, whoop” around this object, which isn’t there.
Jacinta: [00:03:17] Well, we actually plan on doing an episode on black holes related to the Nobel prizes in the future. So I guess we’ll leave the gift for that episode.
Dan: [00:03:24] Okay. We’ll keep you waiting.
Jacinta: [00:03:27] But anyway, the prizes were awarded a couple of weeks ago. And in the last week we’ve also been incredibly busy.
Primarily you Dan, with the 200th anniversary celebrations of the SAAO, the South African Astronomical Observatory.
Dan: [00:03:41] Yeah. So Tuesday, 20th October saw the 200 year anniversary and we had the site unveiled officially as a national heritage site, which is a very, very big deal, which was very stressful.
I had some issues with the live stream, but we don’t talk about those. And then we had a symposium which ran for the remainder of the week from Tuesday to through to Friday, which was really, really cool. I think we had all sorts of talks and, you know, we’ll send you the link where you can go watch all of the talks that were online.
It was a virtual symposium, so everything has been recorded and made available online. And we had talks ranging from obviously the history of the observatory, the history of astronomy in South Africa, socio economic impacts of astronomy, the cultural aspects of astronomy, and then the science. So current science, exciting science and things to come in the future.
So it was a whole range of all of astronomy in South Africa. The symposium was themed to be on 200 years of astronomy, which I really quite liked because it kind of, beyond covers all sorts of things. We can look beyond 200 years ago, we can look beyond 200 years to the future, and then we can look beyond astronomy too.
So yeah, I think it went really well. We got a lot of positive feedback and a lot of interactions. We had almost 500 people, I think in the end, that’s like very cool. And I mean the virtual symposium thing, obviously we didn’t want to do it that way initially, but it meant that we had people joining from all over the world.
We got high profile speakers from all over the world who otherwise probably wouldn’t have travelled. So it, it really did. Yeah, I think it set the tone for how we can do virtual conferences in the future.
Jacinta: [00:05:26] Yeah. I mean, Dan, honestly, for you and your team, Congratulations! I was absolutely blown away by the, the standard that was set.
I mean the speed of the pivot to virtual conferencing was incredible. And you’ll set up an entire professional TV studio right here at the SAAO. As you know, I was chairing one of the sessions with yourself and then also with another person. And I was expecting it to be in ZOOM, just sitting together in front of a computer, a laptop, looking into the camera on the laptop and talking together.
But no! It was a full ON TV studio. We had a set manager giving us the countdown to when we go to go live, we had headpieces. And what do you call these?
Dan: [00:06:10] The little Madonna Microphone. I think Madonna was the first to do that.
Jacinta: [00:06:16] Like the earpiece where you can hear people like telling you instructions through that, it was super cool and yeah, very, very professionally done.
Very speaking span. And yeah, again, I was also really impressed by the variety of talks. And there was a lot on history, which I wasn’t actually expecting, but I learnt a lot from that. I guess it’s hard to conceptualize really how long 200 years is, and how much the world has changed and how much South Africa has changed in that time. So that was, that was really quite fascinating.
Dan: [00:06:49] And astronomy, I mean, how much astronomy is changing.
Jacinta: [00:06:51] That is just unbelievable how much it’s changed in 200 years! We actually heard from the president of the Royal Astronomical Society in England. She was able to join, as you said, because of the virtual nature of the conference and the Royal Astronomical Society also celebrating their bicentenary this year.
So 200 years of the SAAO here, and 200 years of the society they’re in, in England. And it’s, it’s an enormous history with incredible growth.
Coming back to science, another thing that’s happened in the last week or two. Dan it’s been quite a, quite a busy few weeks. Is that a special astronomy edition of the National Research Foundations, “Science Matters” magazine was published and that was actually edited by you and I, and had a lot of contributions from many research astronomers here in South Africa. And I think that gave a really nice overview of the huge variety of astronomy coming out of South Africa here, which obviously we’re trying to promote through this podcast and to share all that knowledge, but even so, even though we’re quite plugged into that, I was still blown away by the huge variety.
I mean, there’s things like: everything from the larger scales of cosmology simulating the entire universe; studying these things called the baryonic acoustic oscillations, which are basically the largest scales in the entire universe. Down to studying galaxies, galaxy evolution with the MeerKAT telescope, with SALT; down to studying stars that are releasing huge amounts of X-rays; down to even here on the Earth and as you said, the socio-economic impact of astronomy, which was phenomenal. The huge breadth and the range of the whole,
Dan: [00:08:33] Yeah. I mean, we say it over and over again,
Jacinta: [00:08:36] It sounded a bit like a broken record, I guess, but it’s true.
Dan: [00:08:39] But the astronomy in South Africa, we’re quite passionate about it.
Jacinta: [00:08:43] As we can may be hear. So also talking about sharing all of this with the public and the socio-economic impact, there was also this virtual festival of astronomy alongside the symposium.
Dan: [00:08:56] Yes, that was pretty cool too. So, obviously trying to reach the public as much as possible. We wanted to have an astro fest where we could do stargazing and everything, but we couldn’t do that.
So we pivoted to virtual and we had talks from various people. We had the people representing NASA and others, and again, the advantage of being able to get people from all over the world to contribute. So we had various talks, we had some workshops on how to engage in astronomy to communicate astronomy.
We had a nice webinar on science communication, and then we had virtual staff party on the Friday night.
Jacinta: [00:09:31] How did that go? And what was it? how was the music?
Dan: [00:09:35] It was pretty cool. I mean, I don’t know, like I love the DJ. So master KG, who some people may know, he’s very popular at the moment here in South Africa. He’s had one major hit and everyone’s dancing to it, including myself on Friday, but anyway, he kind of started rough and he sort of eased you into a set.
So we had going on the TV and it’s kind of cool, funky music. And then, we interspliced that with some virtual stargazing. So we had a telescope set up, it just an amateur telescope, 16 inch, with a camera attached to it. We slewed it around and pointed at various objects. So, you know, while the music was playing, we had text on the screen as to what you were looking at.
And people got an opportunity to look at some of these things, as you would see them through an outreach telescope, rather than through one of our large telescopes who actually don’t make very good images at all. They are directed at science. They didn’t really doing spectroscopy or something similar. They’re not making these pretty images.
Jacinta: [00:10:35] But sometimes they are
Dan: [00:10:37] Some of them do. Looking at it as you would see it if you went on a stargazing evening or visited us here. So it was pretty cool. I enjoyed it and we got some good feedback. I think people really enjoyed all of those events and it was a nice way of interacting.
Jacinta: [00:10:53] Nice. Hopefully some of our listeners are also able to participate in that, but even if you miss that, there’s still a chance to participate in the celebrations with. There’s a planetarium show I believe.
Dan: [00:11:05] Yeah. So for my sons, I was doing another thing too. So on Monday 19th, we had the premier of a new planetarium show focusing on South African astronomy.
So it’s a project that we’ve been working on for a couple of years now, along with Sally Macfarlane from UCT. And yeah, we’ve recorded a full length. So that’s 24 minute planetarium show, full dome experience. We incorporate some indigenous knowledge, the history of astronomy in the country at the various exciting locations and telescopes.
We’ve got shots from MeerKAT and drone footage from Sutherland, which has just spectacular.
Jacinta: [00:11:41] I haven’t seen it yet, but I can’t wait.
Dan: [00:11:43] It’s the coolest thing flying over Sutherland. And seeing all those telescopes, it’s spectacular. So yeah, I mean, and then we give an introduction to multi wavelength, astronomy, then multi- messenger astronomy, which is a lot of what we’re doing here in South Africa at the moment.
So it went really well. It was well received and it’ll be in a planetarium near you. Hopefully soon.
Jacinta: [00:12:02] Right, so this is called “Rising Star”. And it’s currently in the Iziko planetarium here in Cape town, and you’ve made it free for planetariums all around the world to, to release, right?
Dan: [00:12:12] Yeah. So it’s freely available. We have distributed it already to Bloemfontein and to the Naval Hill planetarium and the planetarium in Sutherland. There’s over 4,000 planetaria around the world and it’s freely available to all of them.
Jacinta: [00:12:26] Great. So if you run a planetarium and you want the show, get in touch! Well, can we actually play a little snippet of the planetarium show?
Dan: [00:12:34] Yeah, sure. I mean, we can play the voiceover and we do have a trailer, so we’ll post the trailer on the,
Jacinta: [00:12:43] On the website. Alright. So we’re going to play a little bit of the audio now, but for the full visual effects, well, go to Sydney planetarium show, but you can also head to our website for the trailer.
[Trailer Audio]
Trailer: [00:13:11] Humans have always looked up to the night sky and wondered at the repeating patterns of the celestial bodies. What are they? Where are they from? and what is their connection to us? To answer these questions? We created stories.
A San legend tells the story of the origins of our galaxy, the Milky way. A young woman waits for the hunters to return at the end of the day. As it grows dark, she throws ash from the fire into the night sky.This becomes the Milky Way and guides the Hunter safely home after dark.
Everything we know from the Universe starts from studying the light emitted or reflected by objects in space. By detecting and analysing light from an object in space, astronomers can learn about its distance, motion, temperature, density, and chemical composition.
Initially, astronomers detected only one type of light, visible light. The type we see with our eyes, which is actually a spectrum of wavelengths that make up the colours of the rainbow.
Light travels very fast. The speed of light is about 300,000 kilometres per second. This means that the light from the Sun, which is 150 million kilometres away takes just over eight minutes to get to us on Earth.
So when we look at the sun, we were actually seeing it as it was about eight minutes ago.
We are looking back in time. Most of objects in the Universe are even further away, and light from the most distant galaxies can take billions of years to reach us.
[Trailer ends]
Jacinta: [00:16:10] Cool. I can’t wait to see it. So I haven’t seen the show yet, but I’m very, very excited. Okay, so speaking of planetarium shows and outreach to the public and stargazing. Today, we’re going to be talking to Susan Murabana Owen, and Chu Owen, who run The Travelling Telescope program in Kenya, as we said at the start of the episode.
Chu and Susan kind of do “everything”! They have so many projects going on. They’ve got a program to take a telescope around, to do school visits in Kenya, also astrotourism. They’ve even built an entire planetarium out of bamboo! So I managed to chat with Sue and Owen when they visited Cape Town a little while ago, for the African Astronomical Society meeting, where I believe she was appointed to the role of a, I think it was something to do with planetarium coordinator for the committee. I can’t remember the exact role. But she also has a whole bunch of other roles. She’s the founding president of the African Planetarium Association and the national coordinator of Astronomy Without Borders and Universal Awareness, etc.
So Chu and Susan do a whole range of things.
Dan: [00:17:24] Very, very busy people and very passionate people, which is wonderful. I think that there’s various levels in which you can participate in outreach and science engagement. And it’s just wonderful to hear people like Sue and Chu, who really just get down on the ground, feet on the ground, reaching people and trying on the stars. And it’s fantastic.
Jacinta: [00:17:43] So shall we hear from them?
Dan: [00:17:44] Absolutely!
[Music]
Jacinta: [00:17:52] With us now is Chu Owen and Susan Murabana Owen. Welcome to the studio, can you just tell us a bit about who you are and where you’re from and what you do?
Susan: [00:18:04] My name is Susan Murabana. I’m from Kenya and I’m the co-founder of The Travelling Telescope.
Chu: [00:18:10] My name is Chu Owen, originally from England. I now also am in Kenya.
Jacinta: [00:18:15] Great, Susan and Chu, you mentioned that you are working on something called The Travelling Telescope. Can you tell us more about what that is?
Susan: [00:18:22] So The Travelling Telescope is a social business as we like to call it. We work with schools, providing education tools to support the teachers and to get the kids excited, but we also work with the tourism sector.
What we do is we charge schools that can afford, international schools and private schools to get our services. We have a big telescope. We have a mobile planetarium. We’re just in the process of setting up permanent planetarium in Nairobi. It’s going to be called the Nairobi planetarium.
And we have other tools, one in partnership with Airbus foundation, which is a robotics program that we take around to schools. So one of the key things we’re very excited about is working with young people, but we also want to engage the wider Kenyan and African audience. Through to I presume Kenya has unpolluted dark skies.
They are really good and I would like to use that to showcase Kenya in Africa, in terms of astronomy.
Chu: [00:19:20] We’ve got to, like Susie said, we’ve got two main sides to what we do, which is the educational side and then the tourism side. But within those there’s other areas as well. So like within the schools, within the international schools, as Susie said, we’d do charge.
And then when we can, we get funding to do schools that don’t necessarily have access to the funding, but we don’t want to miss them out if possible. So we do look for funding to get to the less served schools. And then even within the tourism side, there’s like, you know, more local tourism, like people from Kenya, from Nairobi who wants to, you know, learn more about the sky.
And then of course, international tourists. And that tends to be like the lodges and the more sort of, you know, the higher end things. So within both of those areas, we’ve got different sort of levels, which we try to engage with.
Susan: [00:20:00] Part of the reason we charge is obviously to be sustainable and to help and, you know, provide opportunities for young Kenyan graduates in astronomy or other science fields to work with us and make something from what they are doing. But also really it’s to get the buy-in from the Kenyan or African community.
So one of the things we do is then “Nairobi Star Party”, where we charge a minimal fee for families to come, and journalists and all different people who pay to look through the telescope have to go into the planetarium. And for us, we feel by their, the community is paying, it means the value of what we do and are willing to, you know, use a bit of their money to enjoy.
So having that means that it’s going to be sustainable, not necessarily financially, but also in terms of interest from the community or the people.
Chu: [00:20:53] Obviously our tools are the main focus of what we do, which is the telescope and the planetarium. And then we have this robotics kits and some other hands-on activities, including virtual reality headsets.
But we are like the guides. We are like the safari guides for the astronomy world. So we know the sky pretty well, and we observed in, you know, how objects form and what happens through the evolution of different things in the sky. And so, you know, for example, on a night time thing with the telescope, we have our very powerful laser pointers. While we’re highlighting certain objects and we have microphones, but it’s an interactive thing. So it’s presenter led, but with the astronomy guides.
Susan: [00:21:29] So through what we do, we have obviously received a lot of attention and appreciation, especially locally from where we are. So obviously we’re talking about the fact that you’re trying to do it as a business, but with social impact.
And one of the things you do is obviously try to bring in the local communities that are very connected to the sky. To connect with the sky the traditional stories they have, because this story is quickly getting lost because they’re not asking or telling them. And if you go to a community that has, you know, all this wildlife and has all these two areas and you get the locals to talk about the sky, they feel that they’re part of that project that you’re bringing into the community.
Jacinta: [00:22:13] Gosh, you do so much! I’m almost speechless and not sure what else to ask. That’s just so fantastic. I guess. Why astronomy? Why did you choose astronomy as a platform?
Chu: [00:22:25] So for me, I got into astronomy sort of later. My primary world was the film world. And I got into that through arts and photography and music.
In fact, at school, the sciences were a complete mystery to me and I can’t blame my teachers for that, but it’s like, it just wasn’t appealing to me and I didn’t pay any attention to it in school. So I didn’t pursue that kind of area, but sort of getting more interested in it when I was, you know, in my twenties I suppose. I was like, why did nobody come and sort of share the wonder of science, particularly astronomy with me at school?
Cause that just never happened. Nobody there never had like an engaging thing with about science, but for me, seeing Saturn in a telescope was just mind blowing. And I was like, why had nobody during all of those years of education that I had at school? Why did nobody ever say that there’s this, there’s all these things up there, which are visible to you and even in a small telescope, which you can’t help, but wonder at, and I want to ask more questions about.
Susan: [00:23:23] I think for me, it was also, you remember the young girl us to find the Plough in the sky in school. And I struggled seeing it. And when my classmates went back to school and reported what they had seen. I didn’t see it. And now, you know, having that sky and learning about it and telling people about it, that is such a fulfilment. But also knowing that there could be young boys and girls like me struggling to see the sky and struggling to like science, gives me that drive to do it.
Obviously, knowing that astronomy is an intriguing science, it sparks curiosity. And the fact that we are a dark continent, so why not make use of that beautiful sky and shade to the rest of the world? The other thing that stands out for me in astronomy is the fact that when we look at a satellite image of the Earth, that all borders, we all belong to this planet and trying to use that to get our leaders to speak together.
And everyone just loving our planet and taking care of it is one of the things that makes me very excited about what we do. So I think those are the two things that led to that. And obviously right now, there’s a lot of really cool things happening in the continent in astronomy. And looking back at when I started in outreach in astronomy and now, it’s just an exciting time in Africa to be doing what we’re doing.
And that’s also something that excites me.
Jacinta: [00:24:53] Yeah, absolutely. I really agree with you about how we’re all united under one sky. And that, that is why astronomy can cross all borders and all cultures and all divides because we’re all under the same sky. Now I have to admit that as a professional radio astronomer, I don’t know anything about anything that you can see with your eyes in the sky.
So I have a question. The Plough is that the same as the Big Dipper?
Chu: [00:25:17] Yes.
Jacinta: [00: 25:18] Okay.
Chu: [00: 25:20] It’s got four names, the Big Dipper, the Ursa Major, the Plough and the Great Bear. Probably others in other languages as well, of course.
Jacinta: [00: 25:29] So the people who are familiar with the night sky going to laugh at me a little bit with these questions, but I imagine so, so you spend most of your time in Kenya, is that right?
Susan: [00: 25:38] Yeah, we do spend most of our time in Kenya. We have been to Tanzania with The Travelling Telescope a few times. And we really want to travel across the rest of Africa with The Travelling Telescope. I think it’s a beautiful name to talk about exactly what we do and we’ve had a few people across the continent who asked for us to visit. So it’s also the fact that you travel when you travel to different parts of the world and look up in the sky, there’s something unique and different. And with the culture and the people, it just has a way of humbling news. So I think we’d like to, you know, explore the idea of traveling to more countries across Africa, with our model and sharing with them what we have, and also getting to learn about what’s happening.
Jacinta: [00:26:26] I imagine the skies in Kenya must be stunning.
Chu: [00:26:30] Well, one really cool thing about Kenya is that it’s on the equator, which means that you see both hemispheres of the skies as an astronomer.
Jacinta: [00:26:37] Northern and Southern.
Chu: [00:26:39] So you almost see every star in the sky through the year. That’s not true of anywhere, you know, more than 23 degrees North or South of the equator.
So like here, we were looking at the sky last night, I was like, Oh my goodness!, “me, that’s the, that’s the Southern cross really high up in the sky”. And so Susie mentioned earlier, seeing the Great Bear, the Big Dipper who was supposed to be there because her books had told her that it’s a circumpolar constellation.
Of course, she’s looking from the equator. So it’s not, there’s no circumpolar constellation at the equator because the sky rotates around pretty much the horizons. But also Kenya has obviously a lack of development you could argue in some ways, but that has a beneficial effect on the views of the night sky.
So you have very, very large dark sky areas. One of the biggest parks, Safari parks and wildlife parks is Tsavo. And we’re actually in the process of looking to try to get that turned into a dark sky reserve and with the international dark sky association. And hopefully, maybe even more, if we can get one, we could hopefully get another. Also one of the brilliant things about Kenyan skies or being on the equator is that the ecliptic is right above your head.
So you’re looking through the least amount of atmosphere at any of the planets or the moon, or whatever happens to be, you know, transiting along the ecliptic, including the constellation of the Zodiac. So there’s, there’s loads of reasons why specifically where we are is brilliant. Not that other places aren’t, but it’s just, we’re very lucky with our skies plus the dry climate, which generally is, is also really good to see, you know, any objects in the telescope or with your naked eyes.
Susan: [00:28:07] Yeah. And I don’t think many Kenyans actually know that uniqueness of where we are in terms of the sky.
Jacinta: [00:28:17] Yeah, that’s incredible. So if any of our listeners want to come and see one of your shows, see The Travelling Telescope, how can they find you?
Susan: [00:28:25] We are on Twitter, you can check us up on Twitter @TravelTelescope.
We are on Instagram @thetravellingtelescope, Facebook: The Travelling Telescope, and we have our website info at travellingtelescope.co.uk. So please get in touch with us. And we offer star Safaris and we have the big five in the sky, and we have so much to give you a few. If you want to come and see it.
Jacinta: [00:28:53] So I want to come on Safari and see the big five in the sky. Definitely. Just to finish up. Are there any other messages you’d like our listeners to hear about?
Chu: [00:29:03] Yeah, definitely. We mentioned earlier about how the astronauts on the Apollo mission, who were the first ones to see the Earth rising above the surface of the moon that they’re credited with being the first environmentalist.
And we’ve been very lucky to meet some astronauts in the past few years. Mae Jemison, the first African American woman in space. She’s really cool.
Jacinta: [00:29:23] I am so jealous!
Susan: [00: 29:24] We also met Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian in space. Yeah. And I met Scott Kelly! who went to space for one year. So I was very excited about it, so yes, and they know of what we’re doing.
We’ve had very direct interaction and communication with them,
Chu: [00:29:41] But what I was going to say is, through the astronauts, your perspective can change because there’s only about 600 of them who have ever seen the Earth from space. And they all say pretty much the ones we’ve met. They say the same thing about how you notice that for a start, there’s no borders from space. We are all one on this planet and we all breathe the same air, you know, the very thin atmosphere, which if you compare the Earth to an onion, then the, the atmosphere is like the skin is that thin. So obviously, you know, what happens in one area will eventually affect other areas, out on the ocean is the same as well.
But strangely through looking up, we’ve we find ourselves looking at our own planet differently. So it kind of gives you new eyes on the Earth, which is nothing you’d expected to be doing, using a telescope.
Susan: [00:30:23] So, one other thing I’d like to say is that obviously we do chase the sky and try to share that with people.
But we have mentioned our planetarium. And there’s a meeting happening in two days to set up an African affiliates for the international planetarium society. These are excellent tools to use, to show the sky and to discuss things like the environment and biodiversity and all these things.
And so we’re very excited that that is happening. And also just very excited to know that there’s a lot of collaboration and support from big organizations like the United nations, environment program to push for the message of climate change. Which is real and to see what scientists are doing, using their data, to get to talk to important decision makers about climate change and how we can change that and protect our planet.
Chu: [00:31:17] But it’s also that through science, it’s really the only way that sustainability can happen. How do we purify water? How do we desalinate ocean? If we’d need to do that for drinking water, how do you get energy? Not using fossil fuels? You know, it’s all science! You looked at solar panels, they were popularized and developed really for the space industry, where there is no access to oil in flying around the Earth.
You need to use this, the power of the sun. So obviously solar panels are a good example of direct effect on Earth. X-ray technology. You know, x-rays were discovered by astronomers as well, and now we all use them when we break up arm or whatever. So yeah, there’s loads of examples where we talk about how science and an interesting science can actually directly have an effect on well-being of humans on Earth.
Susan: [00:32:00] And if there’s any young African listeners, especially the ones who are still in school. If there are any of them out that can take the message home of how important science is in our everyday life and reach out to organization science centres and learn more about science in a fun way.
Chu: [00:32:20] One more thing, our planetarium were making out of bamboo!
Jacinta: [00:32:26] Wait, what?
Chu: [00: 32:28] So, it could be a geodesic dome, which is made of bamboo. When we’ve been in the process of designing this hexagonal hub thing, which is also made of bamboo so that these, anyway, I have to show you pictures of it. But they are in the process of doing that and possibly even making a telescope out of bamboo as well, because bamboo is a wonderful material.
That’s just super quick to grow and a great for the soil. Just sort of put that in.
Yeah.
Jacinta: [00: 32:48] Maybe we can put a picture of it on our website. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for speaking with us today. This has been absolutely fantastic and the best of luck with everything and we’re all supporting you. We’re all behind you.
Chu: [00:33:01] Thank you so much. Yeah, we look forward to you coming up to Kenya or even us coming down to South Africa with our program.
Susan: [00:33:07] Yeah. Thank you very much.
Jacinta: [00:33:08] Yeah. It’s a deal!
[Music]
Dan: [00:33:10] Awesome. We need to send them rising star.
Jacinta: [00:33:24] Yeah, definitely. Of course!
Dan: [00:33:26] We will post a picture of the planetarium. You know, obviously all the work they’re doing is fantastic and The Travelling Telescope, the planetarium is very exciting and novel. It’s a bamboo frame with a piece of canvas over the top. That’s spectacular.
Jacinta: [00:33:39] Brilliant! Yeah. So they’ve actually, between us chatting and now, they’ve actually finished the planetarium and it’s off and running.
Dan: [00:33:45] Yeah. I mean, it looks brilliant and that sort of, I don’t know, initiative is just incredible.
Jacinta: [00:33:50] Yeah, next level. I really liked their message about, it’s similar to what we heard from Vanessa McBride in episode 26, about us all being under one sky and that there’s no borders if you look down on the earth from space. Like if you look at a map, of the world or a globe, it’s still delineated into countries, but actually that’s not what the world looks like. There aren’t any actual physical borders. And so using astronomy as a message to bring everybody together, also using it as a hook to spark interest in students, in the public, to get buy-in from society and also to use as a perspective and tool for environmental protection.
I mean, these are all of the ways that astronomy can really actually help society because it’s, it seems like an intangible thing, but actually it can have a really real impact.
Dan: [00:34:41] We’ve spoken a lot about it before. I mean, I think that astronomy has this very, very special role and it’s very, very powerful.
This is just another example of it. It’s a great way to get people some perspective on what’s actually important and
Jacinta: [00:35:00] Exactly. We saw it a lot during the conference last week, the image of the pale blue dot and also the EHT image and how popular they’ve become in the entire world. Like what, 4 billion people or something have seen the EHT image now?
Because it gives us some humility, some modesty, some perspective on ourselves. It also reminded me listening to Susan and Chu about a talk that was given last week by Amidou Sorgho about Astros day. So he’s working with the OAD, the Office of Astronomy for Development, and he was researching a program that I think has been implemented in the Himalayas.
Called Astros days where you have Astro tourism, just like Susan and Chu were talking about. Where people come to admire the pristine night skies of the area. But there were found that there was very little cultural interaction between the visitors and the local people and that this was missing out an entire aspect of the whole thing.
And so, they’ve set up like an astronomy tourist homestays situation called Astro stays, where the visitors come and stay in the homes of the local people. And then there’s an interaction and a cultural exchange, and it seems to enrich the whole process. And perhaps that’d be, that might be something that would be interesting to also apply in Kenya and South Africa.
Dan: [00:36:18] Yeah. And the host also received some training, right? Like in terms of, stargazing, which is like, it’s great! It’s a full experience and you can sort of pass on some real benefits, tangible benefits to the communities, rather than them going to a big hotel or something.
Jacinta: [00:36:37] Right. While the community are involved, it’s there, it’s ownership.
Sue also mentioned incorporating local and traditional stories of the night sky when she’s discussing the sky with her visitors. And we were actually preparing another episode about this based in South Africa for next steps.
Dan: [00:36:58] Yeah. I had a wonderful interview and we will talk about that more next week.
Jacinta: [00:37:01] Yeah. So stay tuned for that one that’s coming up next. I think we’ll end off here today and we’ll leave the rest for the next episode.
Dan: [00:37:08] Thanks very much for listening and we hope you’ll join us again. On the next episode of The Cosmic Savannah,
Jacinta: [00:37:14] You can visit our website, thecosmicsavannah.com, where we’ll have the transcript, links and other stuff related to today’s episode.
You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @cosmicsavannah. That’s Savannah, spelled S-A-V-A-N-N-A-H.
Dan: [00:37:30] Special thanks today to Susan Murabana Owen and Chu Owen for speaking with us.
Jacinta: [00:37:34] Thanks to Sumari Hattingh for social media and transcription assistance and Andy Firth for show note preparation. Also to Mark Allnut for music production, Janus Brink and Michal Lyczek for photography and Lana Ceraj for graphic design.
Dan: [00:37:47] We gratefully acknowledge support from the South African National Research Foundation, the South African Astronomical Observatory and the University of Cape Town Astronomy Department to help keep the podcast running.
Jacinta: [00:37:58] You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’d like to help us out, please rate and review us and recommend us to a friend.
Dan: [00:38:06] And we’ll speak to you next time on the cosmic Savannah.
[Behind the scene]
Jacinta: [00:38:18] I actually met a couple of astronauts myself, including Buzz Aldrin. Second person on the moon! But, so I had in my head prepared this whole spiel that I was going to say to him when I met him, “I used the telescope that picked up the signals of you walking on the moon and all of this things”, but what came out?
I just saw him, I got so star-struck. Like, I didn’t think that that was a real thing, but it really is! I saw him, I got so star-struck and I just said, “Ummm, I study galaxies” and he was like, okay. But he was very kind and very nice.
Chu: [00:38:58] How appropriate is it that astronomers getting star-struck!?
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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