Be the Public in my Public Outreach!

A lot of my job has to do with educating the general public about e-VLBI and radio astronomy.

(Skip this paragraph if you already know what those last two terms are. Theoretically if you connect a 32-meter dish in Italy to a 6-meter dish in Chile, you've just created a 12,360 kilometer wide telescope! With an instrument that large, you can get great resolution. That's the VLBI part. The e-VLBI part is using high-speed fiber optic networks to connect radio telescopes together. That way astronomers can receive the data in real-time and make any necessary adjustments during the observation period itself. These observations are often scheduled months in advance, so you lose an entire observation if you don't have everything just right.)

JIVE and ASTRON are having an Open Day in October, and part of my job is to put together posters and materials to educate the public about what we do here and get them interested in radio astronomy, computer networking and developing the software that combines all the data from the different telescopes.

So my questions to you are:

• What would YOU want to know about what we do here?
• If you have a child (or if you are a child), what does he or she (or you) want to know about what astronomers really do? Or network engineers? Or software developers?
• If you're a professional, were you interested in your profession as a child or as a student? And what got you interested in it?

Feel free to leave comments here at the site or email me privately (kyun at jive dot nl). I'd love to get your feedback! (Please also let me know whether or not you are actually interested in what we do here. That will help me gauge the level of interest I can expect from the general public!)

Many thanks in advance,
Kristine

p.s. Follow these links to Wikipedia to learn more about VLBI and e-VLBI.

Comments

[Andrea]

I would think a big question would be:
-How much do the telescopes there ACTUALLY have to do with the movie Contact?
What I want to know:
-What are the practical applications, or ... How might this research affect regular people in the future?
-Can the public look at those images like we can on the NASA site? That would be cool.

[Krees]

Ooh that's good. I could do a top misconceptions about astrononmy/radio astronomy. I liked Contact, but we could include falsities from the movie, like that you can literally listen through the telescopes and detect stuff. :) That's not true.

And yes, we can show images. They don't look like the images you see from cameras or optical telescopes, but the radio telescopes get translated into visual images. Check out this page on the ASTRON site to see some of what radio astronomers see.

[Amanda]

I would like to know more about the impact that the observatories have on the local ecology. From the images online, it appears that there is a significant amount of land devoted to one or more radio telescopes. Can the land serve a dual purpose (eg wildlife refuge and observatory) or do security concerns make this impossible?