As the new year begin,
langitselatan also celebrate the first day in 2009 with
Dawn of IYA event in Cihampelas Walk (CiWalk) mall, Bandung, Indonesia. With the idea to bring the telescopes to public area, we choose a mall where many people came to spent their ney year vacation as the venue. Ciwalk itself is an urban mall with town concept, so they have several building separate by pedestrian street with a square in front of the main building. We hold the event in CiWalk town square area, where many people gathered in front of the building.
We started Dawn of IYA at 11 am, under sunny and cloudy sky. Aside of telescope, binocular, and sunglasses, we also brought “You Are Galileo Telescope”. Our purpose are to give insight and excitement on observing with small telescope. And we also share the knowledge of Galileo activities 400 years ago. "You Are Galileo Telescope” is a project from IYA JAPAN. It is a small telescope which is the same size as the one Galileo used 400 years ago. With this telescope, children could watch the same planets and objects Galileo once see through his scope. It is about experiencing again Galileo excitement when he pointed his telescope for the first time to the sky.
There are high curiosity about astronomy among visitors. Their first question were,” What are you doing here?” “what is this?”, “why you bring telescope during the day ?” Could we see something during daylight?” or “isn’t it dangerous to see the sun?”. The question rise from sun observation and telescope to global warming, dark skies issues, 2012 issues and extraterrestrial life. All these help us building awareness about astronomy and universe among public.
We gave chances for visitors to observe the sun and inform them about how to observe the sun. We also teach them about sundials. Among visitors there was astronomy teacher forum community whose very interested to know more about practical astronomy that they can shared with students. Most of our visitors were family with high interest on education session like this for children. It was great to see excitement and happiness in the children face as the parents also gave positive respond about this event and “You Are Galileo Telescope” brings excitement and curiosity about celestial objects.
At the end of my story I would like to add a comment from one of our visitor yesterday. He says," this is exciting to watch the sun and to have this event in a mall. I am happy to know there are scientist who come and visits us here to spread the knowledge. This is good for children".
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We also got several media covered from national media. This is the link from detiknews, kompas newspaper and sindo newspaper.
Report in Indonesia could be found in here
More picture could be found in here and more picture will be upload in the next few days.
For the youtube can be seen from here and here.
Another report and pictures can be read from here.
We were on Waitarere Beach for new years day, one of New Zealands many beautiful holiday and camping spots on the west coast of the Lower North Island. I am one of the members from a nearby observing group called The Levin Stargazers but this time it was just me, my wife and my 6 month old daughter doing our bit for the world.
