Astroblog: Bushfires and Astronomy Education

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Bushfires and Astronomy Education

Amidst the many heartbreaking tragedies and destruction in the recent bushfires are some small, but still significant losses.

On Tuesday with the Gippsland bush fires, Westall Secondary College

lost its school science telescope and all the astronomy equipment

amongst other buildings and equipment at our school campus at the

township of Balook. After discussing this with my Research Science

students, we considered that we need to work towards a replacement. We

came up with an Arts - Technology project to work at turning our hands

towards making our own low-power telescope as Galileo did. We would

like to use this technology to draw what we can see with our eyes,

much as he did many years ago.

Our school is already involved with the NASA CloudSat and GLOBE

missions With these projects we ground truth satellite images from

space, collecting environmental data used with climate models. A

curriculum bridge to link new and old technologies that have helped us

to change our view of the world and gives us a chance to celebrate the

work by technologists, scientists and artists. We look forward to a

replacement and engagement with some astronomy activities later in the

year

It would be great if we could run this as a larger, international

project and are calling for other interested people to join in.

If anyone is interested in helping, please contact me and I will pass you on to the appropriate contact person.

The generosity of people in times of trial never ceases to astound me and fill me with warmth. Over at ScienceBlogs US-based Science Woman is hosting a fund raiser where anyone donation to the Australian Red Cross goes into the draw for two darwin T-shirts. Thanks Folks!

Labels: Astronomy, bushfire, sc

# posted by Ian Musgrave @ 9:42 pm

Comments:

Very nice blog, Ian. This was an interesting article, too. I'm an ex-Melburnian living in Texas now, and the amount of people who have approached me to voice their concerns, sadness and anger at what happened back home was staggering.

Keep up the good work.

Cheers,
Phil

# posted by