Dear Fellow Communicators,
For ESO outreach March could almost be called the month of “outrageous outreach”, aptly illustrating our philosophy of finding unconventional ways of communicating astronomy with the public.
- This month we published our collaboration with the iconic Bavarian car-maker, BMW. To find out why BMW says that ESO sights cannot be forgotten, don’t miss the announcement here below.
- As a small improvised music initiative we launched the exclusive Erasure video for the single Fill us with Fire which features the Very Large Telescope as well as some of ESO’s most stunning images of the night sky. Watch it here.
- We have also been working on a special visit to our sites: the British art photographer Max Alexander is currently in Chile to create his own unique perspective on ALMA and Paranal for ESO’s 50th anniversary. We look forward to his conceptual photography. You can see some of Max’s previous work here.
Another major accomplishment this month has been the launch of an initiative that we have been working on for many years — enriching our images with extra contextual information, or metadata! How does this help you? For example, if you show this image to an audience, apart from the caption describing what you see, in the righthand column you have the coordinates that allow you to find out the position, orientation, and scale of the image. You can navigate directly to Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope and show your audience the image in a broader context. The metadata embedded in the large versions of the images will work in Stellarium and Google Sky as well. And planetarium system producers such as Skyskan, Uniview/SCISS and Evans & Sutherland are actively building Astronomy Visualization Metadata (AVM) support into future versions of their software. We hope you’ll find all this very useful!
On the outreach partnerships front, this month we welcome Christoph Malin to our elite band of Photo Ambassadors! Based near Innsbruck, Austria, Christoph has made hundreds of trips to the Alps, both by bike and on foot, and has always enjoyed the star-filled skies. In 2010 he took up astrophotography and mountain time-lapse photography to record the clear skies and spectacular views for everyone. Read more about him here and don’t miss his and Babak’s story about their trip to Paranal and ALMA.
Last, but not least, we have some good news regarding the CAPJournal. A new edition is almost complete and will soon be released.
And one last thing...be sure to check out our brand new ESO Facebook Timeline!
Let’s reach new heights in astronomy together,
Lars Lindberg Christensen (lars@eso.org)
Head ESO education and Public Outreach Department (ePOD)
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12 March 2012: The famous British synthpop band Erasure today released a video for their latest single — Fill Us with Fire (ESO 50th Anniversary Exclusive), as a tribute to ESO’s 50th Anniversary. ...
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9 March 2012: The European Southern Observatory has launched an initiative to attach extra information about context (metadata) to the images in its huge collection. The Astronomy Visualization Metadata standard that is now ...
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6 March 2012: The iconic Bavarian car-maker BMW chose ESO’s Paranal Observatory, home of the Very Large Telescope (VLT), for the global campaign featuring the brand’s latest high-end model, the 6 Series Gran ...
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