ASTRO-Chile News
Light Pollution & Project ASTRO-Chile
In October 2002, NOAO launched innovative efforts to realize light pollution education on two continents through a new program dubbed “ASTRO-Chile”. These efforts were aided by Internet 2-based videoconferencing between NOAO North and South. Since then, NOAO has co-sponsored six teacher professional development videoconference workshops linking teachers in Tucson, AZ, and La Serena, Chile. Each videoconference has been conducted for the most part in Spanish. In the first videoconference the teachers exchanged methods and ideas about how to explain and demonstrate the nature of light and color to students of various ages. Four bilingual science teachers from the Tucson area discussed pedagogical approaches with their teaching counterparts in Chile. The workshops included demonstrations, project presentations, and the construction and calibration of spectroscopes. The Chilean teachers used these spectroscopes to examine a number of light sources in their town and presented their findings at the second workshop.
The first two workshops were precursors to a third workshop, which concentrated on light pollution studies conducted in La Serena, using limiting magnitudes of stars. This study was used as a template for two further light pollution studies conducted by students in Tucson toward the constellation Cygnus and subsequently toward Orion. Results were presented at the 4th and 5th videoconferences during the fall of 2003 and spring of 2004, respectively. So successful were the results of the studies and subsequent workshops on light pollution, that plans were made for a student-to-student videoconference on joint Tucson-La Serena observations of the October 2004 lunar eclipse. Over 400 students participated in the lunar eclipse study. About 28 of them participated in the videoconference, asking students from the other site questions. Plans are underway for another student-to-student workshop, this time on results of a simultaneous light pollution study toward Orion by students from both continents. Stay tuned for this videoconference during Astronomy Week in April 2005!
These workshops have developed into cross-continent planning for larger light-pollution education efforts to be led by teachers. These efforts dovetail with previous light pollution efforts in Austria and Greece. North and South-based programs are designed to take advantage of successful efforts in the United States such as Project ASTRO, and efforts in Chile, like RedLaSer, by merging the strategies and techniques from each into a cross-cultural exchange.
