Going to SXSW in Austin, Texas, this month? Well so are we! NASA is joining in with the interactive part of the festival with a bunch of amazing and FREE events March 8 – 10th. Maybe you’ve seen the promo?

If you are anywhere near the Long Center for the Performing Arts that weekend, you won’t be able to miss the replica James Webb Space Telescope model out on display. It’s kind of large, like tennis court-sized large, and has a 6-meter wide gold-colored mirror that kind of sticks out. Right next door will be the NASA Experience Tent, a haven from the rain where you can play with infrared cameras, see space telescope hardware, talk with astronomers, engineers, and astronauts, and, of course, play with citizen science with the CosmoQuest team. We’ll be running around with laptops and iPads, showing off the CosmoQuest citizen science projects that you know and love while recruiting new members to join our community. Please, if you see one of us, say hi! By us I mean Pamela Gay, Fraser Cain, Scott Lewis, and me. (Fraser and Scott are pretty tall so you can’t miss them. And Pamela and I have bright enough hair at the moment that you can’t miss us either!)

The tent will also have the gigantor video wall where talks will be held all day and well into the evening. Our fearless leader Pamela will be up there talking at Friday 5:30pm and 9pm, Saturday 2:30pm and 10pm, and Sunday 12:30pm and 10:30pm. There will also be Q&A sessions over Skype with the folks at various NASA centers, World Wide Telescope demonstrations, and autographs with John Grunsfeld, an astronomer and astronaut that has been up to fix the Hubble Space Telescope multiples times. They are going to attempt a Guinness World record for, get this, the largest astronomy lesson at 7:30pm on March 10th, so come be a student for a bit and be a part of that!

And here is my favorite part… we’re doing Star Parties with local amateur astronomers and the good folks at UT Austin, weather permitting of course. AND we’re tying it into our usual Virtual Star Party hangout series. So if you can’t be there in person, that’s okay! We’ll be broadcasting the Sunday night star party, the Friday Weekly Space Hangout, and whatever else we can from on site with Fraser, Alberto Conti of Space Telescope Science Institute, and Tony Darnell of Deep Astronomy. (I really wish I had Google Glass for this… *hint hint*) If it’s cloudy and rainy? Well, we still have our iPads and plenty of citizen science to be done. I’m sure we’ll be tweeting and plussing and all that jazz as long as our batteries/wireless signals hold out.

Can you tell I’m a wee bit excited? WHEEE!