Public Ceremony to kick off the U.S. Program for the International Year of Astronomy 2009 in Long Beach on January 6.
The U.S. astronomical community will kick off a year-long celebration
of astronomy and its contributions to society and culture by using
400-year-old light from a distant star cluster to trigger a
ribbon-cutting ceremony for the International Year of Astronomy 2009.
The public event will take place at the winter meeting of the American
Astronomical Society (AAS) in Long Beach, California, on January 6,
2009.
The International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009) commemorates the
400th anniversary of the first scientific use of a telescope by
Galileo Galilei. More than 135 countries are preparing activities for
IYA2009, which has been endorsed by the United Nations, UNESCO and the
U.S. Congress.
The U.S. IYA2009 opening ceremony will take place at the Long Beach
Convention Center on Tuesday, January 6, in Exhibit Hall B, starting
at 7:45 p.m. PST. The public is encouraged to attend, and the
ceremony will be broadcast live on the World Wide Web at
www.ustream.tv/channel/us-iya-opening-ceremony.
The ceremony will feature a virtual “ribbon cutting” of the IYA2009
presence in the online community Second Life
(www.secondastronomy.org). This action will be initiated using light
from the Pleiades star cluster sent over the Web from the Cincinnati
Observatory, via the world’s oldest telescope still in nightly use by
the general public. Light from this famous star cluster (also known
as the “Seven Sisters”) takes approximately 400 years to reach Earth.
Therefore, the photons of light to be viewed on January 6 were emitted
around the time Galileo first looked through his telescope to
see-among other things-mountains and craters on the Moon, the four
biggest moons of Jupiter, and countless faint stars in the Pleiades
invisible to the unaided eye.
Other highlights of the ceremony include the unveiling of a museum
wall-sized image of a galaxy taken by NASA’s Great Observatories and a
live performance of the official theme song for the IYA2009 “365 Days
of Astronomy” podcast (www.365daysofastronomy.org). A sample of
beautiful astronomy images from the international IYA2009 cornerstone
exhibit project “From Earth to the Universe”
(www.fromearthtotheuniverse.org) and colorful panels from NASA’s
Visions of the Universe exhibit for libraries will be on display.
The ceremony will conclude with the world premiere of a new
high-definition PBS television documentary by Interstellar Studios,
“400 Years of the Telescope, A Journey of Science, Technology and
Thought,” which was filmed at dozens of the world’s greatest
observatories (www.400years.org).
Celestron (www.celestron.com), a global sponsor of IYA2009, has
generously donated a NexStar(R) 130SLT computerized telescope and a
SkyScout(R) Personal Planetarium(R)/SkyScout Scope bundle to be
raffled off during the opening ceremony. SkyScout has been declared
an “Official Product” of IYA2009. Celestron will also provide small
telescopes for public viewing of the Moon and other bright objects
before and after the U.S. opening ceremony, outside the convention
center starting at approximately 6:30 p.m.
The U.S. IYA2009 opening event was made possible in part by a
contribution from Microsoft Research, inventor of the WorldWide
Telescope (www.worldwidetelescope.org). With well over one million
users to date, WorldWide Telescope has been embraced by the
astronomical and education communities as a compelling astronomical
resource for students and lifelong learners.
Key elements of the planned U.S. program for IYA2009 include hundreds
of grassroots star parties and local events (including a focus on the
first weekend of April 2009 as the “100 Hours of Astronomy”- see
www.100hoursofastronomy.org), a new high-quality low-cost telescope
kit called the Galileoscope (www.galileoscope.org), a variety of
dark-skies awareness activities (www.darkskiesawareness.org) and
citizen-science campaigns, and IYA2009 Discovery Guides related to
monthly highlighted sky objects
(www.astrosociety.org/iya/guides.html).
Much more information on IYA2009 can be found at www.astronomy2009.us
and www.astronomy2009.org.
The U.S. IYA2009 program is supported by the National Science
Foundation and NASA, and by private donations. The American
Astronomical Society is the U.S. liaison to the IYA2009 program via
the International Astronomical Union. Key U.S. partners include the
Astronomical Society of the Pacific, the National Optical Astronomy
Observatory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the
Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the National Radio Astronomy
Observatory.
