Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Hello all my Star Gazing Friends

Something out of the ordinary for all of you star gazers out there. 

It's almost here -- The Great World Wide Star Count starts this Friday, October 29th and runs through November 12th. This Windows to the Universe program is an international citizen-science event that encourages everyone, astronomers and non-astronomers alike, to measure their local light pollution and report their observations online.


The Great World Wide Star Count is designed to raise awareness about light pollution as well as encourage learning in astronomy. No prior experience is necessary. All background information needed to participate is on the Star Count Web site (http://starcount.org), along with a downloadable activity guide with the step-by-step instructions (http://starcount.org/downloads.html), now available in 10 languages. All observations will be available online via Google Earth and as downloadable datasets.

Since 2007, people from 64 countries have contributed more than 10,000 observations to Star Count. Please help us spread the word to your families, friends, club members, and especially any teachers or students that you know!

We have a special favor to ask-- if you are a native speaker of French or German and could give us 1-2 hours of your time, we have an urgent need to translate our Activity Guide into those languages before October 29th! If you would like to help, please email us at starcount_info@ucar.edu, indicating your language, age, and level of astronomical knowledge. We'll email you a simple document with the exact phrases we need translated. Once you fill in the form and email it back to us, we'll format it and post it to our website for immediate use. Thanks to volunteers like you, we have recently added Russian and Hindi translations for 2010. Help us make it an even dozen!

Sincerely,
Dennis Ward
Director, The Great World Wide Star Count
UCAR Education and Outreach
http://starcount.org/
http://windows2universe.org/
starcount_info@ucar.edu

No comments:

Post a Comment