This White Paper is a call to action for astronomers to respond to climate change with a large structural transition within our profession. Many astronomers are deeply concerned about climate change and act upon it in their personal and professional lives, and many organizations within astronomy have incorporated incremental changes. We need a collective impact model to better network and grow our efforts so that we can achieve results that are on the scale appropriate to address climate change at the necessary level indicated by scientific research; e.g., becoming carbon neutral by 2050. We need to implement strategies within two primary drivers of our field: (1) Education and Outreach, and (2) Research Practices and Infrastructure. (1) In the classroom and through public talks, astronomers reach a large audience. Astronomy is closely connected to the science of climate change, and it is arguably the most important topic we include in our curriculum. Due to misinformation and disinformation, climate change communication is different than for other areas of science. We therefore need to expand our communication and implement effective strategies, for which there is now a considerable body of research. (2) On a per-person basis astronomers have an outsized carbon impact. There are numerous ways we can reduce our footprint; e.g., in the design and operation of telescope facilities and in the optimization and reduction of travel. Fortunately, many of these solutions are win-win scenarios, e.g., increasing the online presence of conferences will reduce the carbon footprint while increasing participation, especially for astronomers working with fewer financial resources. Astronomers have an obligation to act on climate change in every way possible, and we need to do it now. In this White Paper, we outline a plan for collective impact using a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) approach.
The purpose of this white paper is to provide guidance to funding agencies, leaders in the discipline, and its constituent departments about strategies for (1) improving access to advanced education for people from populations that have long been underrepresented and (2) improving the climates of departments where students enroll. The twin goals of improving access to increase diversity and improving climate to enhance inclusiveness are mutually reinforcing, and they are both predicated on a fundamental problem of inequality in participation. This white paper has been endorsed by the Board of …
Arts are a seamless way to introduce the general public to both basic and more sophisticated astronomical concepts. The visual richness of astronomy makes it attractive and easily incorporated in painting and literature. Astronomy is the only science with a muse - Urania - implying that, at least in the eyes of the ancients, it was an art itself. I review some less well known representation of astronomical concepts in literature with potential application in education.
Hundreds of thousands of astronomy education activities exist, but their discoverability and quality is highly variable. The web platform for astronomy education activities, astroEDU, presented in this paper tries to solve these issues. Using the familiar peer-review workflow of scientific publications, astroEDU is improving standards of quality, visibility and accessibility, while providing credibility to these astronomy education activities. astroEDU targets activity guides, tutorials and other educational activities in the area of astronomy education, prepared by teachers, educators and oth…
Computational skills are required across all astronomy disciplines. Many students enter degree programs without sufficient skills to solve computational problems in their core classes or contribute immediately to research. We recommend advocacy for computational literacy, familiarity with fundamental software carpentry skills, and mastery of basic numerical methods by the completion of an undergraduate degree in Astronomy. We recommend the AAS Education Task Force advocate for a significant increase in computational literacy. We encourage the AAS to modestly fund efforts aimed at providing Ope…
Africa has amazing potential due to natural (such as dark sky) and human resources for scientific research in astronomy and space science. At the same time, the continent is still facing many difficulties, and its countries are now recognising the importance of astronomy, space science and satellite technologies for improving some of their principal socio-economic challenges. The development of astronomy in Africa (including Ethiopia) has grown significantly over the past few years, and never before it was more possible to use astronomy for education, outreach, and development as it is now. Ho…
The San Antonio Teacher Training Astronomy Academy (SATTAA) completed its fourth annual iteration in June 2021 . While the program began as a face-to-face professional development opportunity for future and current school teachers, it transitioned to a fully online opportunity in 2020. In our efforts to offer an astronomy education program that is inclusive and particularly attentive to highly diverse populations, the transition to online programming became a core aspect of scaling up the program. The 2021 iteration featured an international facilitation team, and, for the first time, supporte…
AMACA: Astronomy education with a Multi-sensory, Accessible, and Circular Approach
INAF - Istituto di Radioastronomia（意大利国家天体物理研究所射电天文台）；IAU Office of Astronomy for Education Center Italy（国际天文学联合会天文学教育办公室意大利中心）；INAF - Osservatorio di Astrofisica e Scienza dello Spazio di Bologna（意大利国家天体物理研究所博洛尼亚天体物理学与空间科学观测站）；INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova（意大利国家天体物理研究所帕多瓦天文台）；IAU OAE National Astronomy Education Coordinator Team for Italy（国际天文学联合会天文学教育办公室意大利国家协调团队）；University of Padua（帕多瓦大学）；IRCAM STSM Lab, Sound Perception and Design group（巴黎音乐声学研究所短期访问学者实验室声音感知与设计小组）
Astronomers have played many roles in their engagement with the larger astronomy education ecosystem. Their activities have served both the formal and informal education communities worldwide, with levels of involvement from the occasional participant to the full-time professional. We discuss these many diverse roles, giving background, context, and perspective on their value in encouraging and improving astronomy education. This review covers the large amounts of new research on best practices for diverse learning environments. For the formal education learning environment, we cover pre-unive…
Professional astronomy is historically not an environment of diverse identities. In recognizing that public outreach efforts affect career outcomes for young people, it is important to assess the demographics of those being reached and continually consider strategies for successfully engaging underrepresented groups. One such outreach event, the International Astronomical Youth Camp (IAYC), has a 50-year history and has reached ~1700 participants from around the world. We find that the IAYC is doing well in terms of gender (59% female, 4.7% non-binary at the most recent camp) and LGBT+ represe…
Over the last ten years there has been a large increase in the number of projects using sound to represent astronomical data and concepts. Motivation for these projects includes the potential to enhance scientific discovery within complex datasets, by utilising the inherent multi-dimensionality of sound and the ability of our hearing to filter signals from noise. Other motivations include creating engaging multi-sensory resources, for education and public engagement, and making astronomy more accessible to people who are blind or have low vision, promoting their participation in science and re…
We advocate meaningful support of sustained education-outreach partnerships between regional metropolitan undergraduate institutions and astronomical clubs and societies. We present our experience as an example, in which we have grown a partnership between the University of Michigan-Dearborn (hereafter UM-D, a 4-year primarily undergraduate institution or PUI), Henry Ford College (hereafter HFC, a 2-year undergraduate college), and maintained a strong collaboration with the Ford Amateur Astronomy Club (FAAC), which is highly active in the Detroit Metropolitan Area. By allowing each organizatio…
IAU Inter-Commission B2-C1-C2 WG Data-driven Astronomy Education and Public Outreach (DAEPO) was launched officially in April 2017. With the development of many mega-science astronomical projects, for example CTA, DESI, EUCLID, FAST, GAIA, JWST, LAMOST, LSST, SDSS, SKA, and large scale simulations, astronomy has become a Big Data science. Astronomical data is not only necessary resource for scientific research, but also very valuable resource for education and public outreach (EPO), especially in the era of Internet and Cloud Computing. IAU WG Data-driven Astronomy Education and Public Outreac…
Support for early career astronomers who are just beginning to explore astronomy research is imperative to increase retention of diverse practitioners in the field. Since 2010, Astrobites has played an instrumental role in engaging members of the community -- particularly undergraduate and graduate students -- in research. In this white paper, the Astrobites collaboration outlines our multi-faceted online education platform that both eases the transition into astronomy research and promotes inclusive professional development opportunities. We additionally offer recommendations for how the astr…
The American Astronomical Society's WorldWide Telescope (WWT) project enables terabytes of astronomical images, data, and stories to be viewed and shared among researchers, exhibited in science museums, projected into full-dome immersive planetariums and virtual reality headsets, and taught in classrooms from middle school to college levels. We review the WWT ecosystem, how WWT has been used in the astronomical community, and comment on future directions.
This White Paper highlights the role Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs) play within the astronomy profession, addressing issues related to employment, resources and support, research opportunities and productivity, and educational and societal impacts, among others. Astronomers working at PUIs are passionate about teaching and mentoring undergraduate students through substantive astronomy experiences, all while working to continue research programs that contribute to the advancement of the professional field of astronomy. PUIs are where the majority of undergraduate students pursue po…
The new field of gravitational wave astrophysics requires a growing pool of students and researchers with unique, interdisciplinary skill sets. It also offers an opportunity to build a diverse, inclusive astronomy community from the ground up. We describe the efforts used by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) NSF Physics Frontiers Center to foster such growth by involving students at all levels in low-frequency gravitational wave astrophysics with pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) and establishing collaboration policies that ensure broad participation by dive…
Pictorial and Documentary Guide for Research, Teaching, and Education through Astronomy, Physics, and Mathematics Pursued under the Umbrella of the United Nations (1974-2024)
About one fifth of Ph.D's across all STEM disciplines secure a tenure track position in academia. It is also the case that science and engineering have evolved significantly and so has the nature of the labor market and the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of the greatest scientific challenges. These realities, however, have not altered the main objective of graduate STEM education: the training of unidisciplinary academic researchers. There is therefore a gap between what the students and society need and what graduate STEM education offers. At root of the problem is not only the lack of…
This white paper responds to the Voyage 2050 Call for White Papers from the Science Programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) and argues that education, communication and public engagement (hereafter EPE) should have priority in the Voyage 2050 planning cycle. The ESA Science's Voyage 2050 missions promise insights into the big existential questions of our era: the prevalence of life in the Universe; the nature of space and time; and the intertwined nature of matter, energy and gravity. It is likely that innovations in the acquisition, handling and processing of vast data sets will drive th…
Activities related to access to astronomical facilities and data could offer an effective, entry-level path for outreach and astronomy education. The Government of Italy proposed the Open Universe initiative that was adopted by the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs. Education in astronomy is a key method to promoting rational thinking and the scientific method. We shall discuss how new methods using available data need to be used for outreach and education to help vizualise and understand actual data. We shall show, using GAIA DR2 data, how present data analysis and visualization to…
As our capacity to study ever-expanding domains of our science has increased (including the time domain, non-electromagnetic phenomena, magnetized plasmas, and numerous sky surveys in multiple wavebands with broad spatial coverage and unprecedented depths), so have the horizons of our understanding of the Universe been similarly expanding. This expansion is coupled to the exponential data deluge from multiple sky surveys, which have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into Petabytes (even hundreds of Petabytes) in the next decade. With this …
Over the past few years, there have been a few studies on the development of an interest in science and scientists' views on public outreach. Yet, to date, there has been no global study regarding astronomers' views on these matters. Through the completion of our survey by 155 professional astronomers online and in person during the 28th International Astronomical Union General Assembly in 2012, we explored their development of and an interest for astronomy and their views on time constraints and budget restriction regarding public outreach activities. We find that astronomers develop an inter…
Maximizing the public impact of astronomy projects in the next decade requires NSF-funded centers to support the development of online, mobile-friendly outreach and education activities. EPO teams with astronomy, education, and web development expertise should be in place to build accessible programs at scale and support astronomers doing outreach.
The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is an open access digital library portal for researchers in astronomy and physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant, successfully serving the professional science community for two decades. Currently there are about 55,000 frequent users (100+ queries per year), and up to 10 million infrequent users per year. Access by the general public now accounts for about half of all ADS use, demonstrating the vast reach of the content in our databases. The visibility and use of content in the ADS can be measured by …
The new 1-m f/4 fast-slew Zadko Telescope was installed in June 2008 about 70 km north of Perth, Western Australia. It is the only metre-class optical facility at this southern latitude between the east coast of Australia and South Africa, and can rapidly image optical transients at a longitude not monitored by other similar facilities. We report on first imaging tests of a pilot program of minor planet searches, and Target of Opportunity observations triggered by the Swift satellite. In 12 months, 6 gamma-ray burst afterglows were detected, with estimated magnitudes; two of them, GRB 090205 (…
Communities of practice in science communication can make important contributions to public engagement with science but are under-researched. In this article, we look at the perspectives of a community of practice in astronomy communication regarding (relations with) their public(s). Most participants in this study consider that public(s) have several deficits and vulnerabilities. Moreover, practitioners have little to no contact with (and therefore make no use of) academic research on science communication. We argue that collaboration between science communication researchers and practitioner…
We introduce PIRATE, a new remotely-operable telescope facility for use in research and education, constructed from 'off-the-shelf' hardware, operated by The Open University. We focus on the PIRATE Mark 1 operational phase where PIRATE was equipped with a widely- used 0.35m Schmidt-Cassegrain system (now replaced with a 0.425m corrected Dall Kirkham astrograph). Situated at the Observatori Astronomic de Mallorca, PIRATE is currently used to follow up potential transiting extrasolar planet candidates produced by the SuperWASP North experiment, as well as to hunt for novae in M31 and other nearb…
Strategic Plan for Astronomy in the Netherlands 2011 - 2020, written by the Netherlands Committee for Astronomy (NCA), on behalf of the excellence research school in astronomy NOVA, (combining the university astronomy institutes of the universities of Amsterdam, Groningen, Leiden and Nijmegen), the NWO division of Physical Sciences, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy ASTRON and the Netherlands Institute for Space Research SRON. The Strategic plan outlines the scientific priorities for Dutch astronomy in the next decade; the instrumentation effort required to address these priorities…
