Dear Fellow Communicators,
The exciting Pale Red Dot campaign has reached its half way point and astronomers have recently demonstrated the type of data they are analysing. You can find the blog post here and even try to guess if any of the plots reveal a planet around Proxima Centauri. The idea that you may be looking at the first signal indicating a planet around the closest star to our Solar System is nothing short of mind-boggling! Pale Red Dot is the first outreach campaign to take the audience all the way from the observations to the final science paper. Opening up the research process that astronomers undertake is a unique opportunity to engage the public with the science (grit and dirt included).
In February we launched a call for participants to join ESO’s first social media gathering at our sites in Chile. We have received a huge number of applications from very engaged people who would like to get to know ESO better. You can read the conversations on #MeetESO. We are now in the process of confirming the eight lucky winners. They will be reporting from the ESO sites in Chile during the Mercury Transit this May. More about the campaign here.
Our planetarium colleagues are invited to check out the latest fulldome clips we have added to our archive, which you can download and use in your planetarium. We have just uploaded fulldome clip and movie number 200 in the ESO and Hubble video archives, and have added a 360 degree panorama category to our image archive.
Work for the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre is progressing well. The star roof is almost ready to complete the building itself, and content is in production. We will soon launch an invitation for a third teacher training course (in German) so stay tuned.
Don’t forget that you can submit your astrophotographs to the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition and to the Photo Nightscape Awards. If you are a teacher you can also encourage your students to take part in Catch a Star!
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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10 February 2016: A celebration was held at the APEX [1] base station in Sequitor, San Pedro de Atacama, to mark ten years of astronomical research with the APEX telescope, which resides on ...
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4 February 2016: At an extraordinary meeting in Garching bei München, Germany on 3 February 2016, ESO’s Finance Committee authorised ESO to enter into final discussions with the winning bidder of the ...
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4 March 2016: The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is famed for its dark night skies, which can be enjoyed in their full glory thanks to the absence of light pollution. But even ...
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