Hey everyone! I’m putting on stargazing classes in my city with the help of the city parks dept. It involves lugging out 12" dob (we mostly hang out ~120x mag, but I have plans to really juice the magnification if we get small classes and good seeing), some binoculars, and a green laser pointer. I just did the first one last night, and I found it to be a hugely rewarding experience. Unfortunately, the class was a bit on the smaller side and not asking too many questions (I think because it was cold AF for California), and I found the energy kind of flagging halfway through. My plan has been to teach the basics of star finding, telescope use, etc. and follow the Astronomical League’s Urban Stargazing program (I want to help folks get certified if they’re interested). I was wondering if anyone else has done any kind of astronomy public outreach and if they had any advice to help keep the engagement up when folks are taking turns peeking through the scope. In case you might be wondering, it’s not a GOTO or PUSH TO scope, I personally find that there’s a bit of magic in manually slewing the scope, but it does unfortunately mean that I spend extra time bringing the scope back on target between students using it.
We ended up with probably a dozen participants, with most coming and going within about 20 mins out of the hour. Again, I think the weather was a big part of it, but I was really hoping they would find it worth it to stay. We started the night off viewing Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Venus, (not part of the urban stargazing program, but I wanted to include them), and moved on to showing the Pleiades and Hyades through low mag binoculars, and then on to the Orion Nebula and Theta Orionis, and finally Gamma Andromedae. Then, most people started to dip and we just kind of did requests until the end of class. Maybe I’m just enough of a dork that it would have kept me around in spite of the weather, but I worry that it wasn’t interesting enough. Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks, that all makes sense! I noticed in hindsight that people were a little less jazzed about Trapezium than I was expecting. I mean, they appreciated it, but compared to my own initial reaction in seeing it (I had to go and tell someone right away), it was pretty muted. Sounds like I’ll have to do some homework.
That last line really grabbed my attention.
Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean here?
Also, I should probably make clear that this is going to be a weekly recurring class that happens at different city parks. I’m trying to get people interested in actually doing amateur astronomy.
Imagine going to a public class on… let’s say playing the electric guitar, and the instructor just keeps going on and on about tuning forks, gear maintenance, and music theory. You were just hoping to learn how to play Stairway to Heaven, despite never having touched a guitar in your life.
The telescope is actually a hurdle to most people who will ever look through one. Introducing people to amateur astronomy by talking about making the sausage doesn’t whet the appetite. It’s dry, it’s small, and it’s boring. And it’s not relevant to 90% of people who will ever show up – they’re not going to race out and spend hundreds of dollars on a worthwhile telescope. It’s the kind of thing you talk about once people are hooked, want to view things independently, and are actually ready to invest their time, energy, and money into the hobby.
Amateur astronomy happens first in the mind. The imagination is accessible; the nitty gritty of operating a manual telescope is actually quite exclusionary, and fails to meet people where they actually are.
This is great advice, I’m very grateful that you responded! I did start out pointing out the constellations and the different features we would look at, but after reading this, I realize now that I got people looking into the scope way too early, and there was basically nowhere left for me to go after that. This also makes me think about doing a separate thing just for helping people get astronomical league certs, then.