NSBP Member, Hakeem Oluseyi, selected to be a TEDGlobal 2012 Fellow March 31, 2012

IAU Office of Astronomy Development Stakeholder’s Workshop – Day 3 December 17, 2011

by Dr. Jarita Holbrook
Tuesday December 15, 2011

The morning began with two presentations about funding. One was given by Ravi Sheth about International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy; the other by Ernst van Groningen about International Science Programme of Uppsala University, Sweden. Dr. van Groningen’s presentation included a framework much like a spreadsheet of things to think about and include before writing a request for funding that I thought was particularly useful. His talk can be seen at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/19135075 starting at about 15 minutes into the broadcast. The rest of the morning was dedicated to two talks by popular vote: one by Pedru Russo and Valerio Ribeiro about Evaluation Metrics, the other by Carolina Govender about Evaluation & Planning focusing on having evaluation at every step of project planning. The first talk starts at about five minutes into the stream and the second about twenty one minutes into the stream.

The unique activity of the workshop was the Unconference Topics. Over the workshop there was a place for participants to write down topics that they wanted to discuss that they thought were important. Then the participants voted on each topic, those that received the most votes won. There were five popular topics:
1. Citizen Science,
2. Mobile Planetaria,
3. Distance Education,
4. Managing Volunteers, and
5. Evidence for economic development resulting from astronomy.

I joined the last group. After much discussion we determined there were four steps that OAD should take
A. The OAD should host a webpage where links to previous reports can be accessed. For example, it is possible to get actual amounts that governments spend on astronomy, as well as organizations such as NASA in the USA produce annual reports by state of the impact of NASA funding.
B. OAD should analyze the metrics and evaluation methods used in these existing reports and
C. determine if we need to develop new metrics to suit OAD goals or simply use existing ones.
D. OAD should develop a team of people that can then go to astronomy facilities and assess the economic impact of each. Why would such a team be important? As with all forms of evaluation and assessment associated with projects, the funders want to know where their money went and that positive things have come out of their investment. I would like to know who benefits from astronomy dollars and how this breaks down demographically by gender and ethnicity. To do this OAD will have to partner with more than just astronomers.

My thoughts about the workshop are positive. It brought together stakeholders who were primarily interested in
1. Educating the public about astronomy,
2. Attracting young people to become astronomers, and
3. Increasing the number of university level astronomy classes and programs worldwide.

As a result, most of the attendees were astronomers. For the next workshop, I would like to see stakeholders from the towns nearest observatories, from government offices responsible for development, from the United Nations Development Program, and perhaps indigenous rights groups. The point of the workshop was to help shape the breadth and scope of the new Office of Astronomy for Development, it would be interesting to get input from these development stakeholders.

IAU Office of Astronomy Development Stakeholder’s Workshop – Day 2 December 14, 2011

by Dr. Jarita Holbrook
Tuesday December 14, 2011

The IAU Office of Astronomy for Development (OAD) has three established task forces. Tuesday December 13th, the workshop participants were assigned to task forces and met for the morning session. The goal was to brainstorm new ideas at the intersection of astronomy and development, but also to consider how to implement the published OAD Strategic Plan.

In the afternoon we had breakout sessions by regions. The divisions were Africa and the Middle East, Latin America, Asia Pacific, North America, and Europe. In these breakout sessions we were to examine our regional strengths and regional needs. North America consisted of representatives from the United States and Canada. Mexico joined the Latin America group.

As with other places worldwide North America has underserved populations that we would like to help such as First Nations/Native Americans, underrepresented groups, inner city underclass, etc. There were two tiers of needs, the first was to do things that astronomers normally do but reach these underserved communities. That is astronomy education and astronomy outreach, there are already many programs and networks to do these but these need to be extended to these communities. The second need was to consider social justice, cultural awareness, and egalitarian science in the context of astronomy for development.

This area was a fairly new way of thinking for astronomers and specific strategies, methods, actions and activities are left for the future. Unlike other parts of the world, North America is rich in resources including in plain old cash!

There are over 300 volunteers registered through the OAD website, few of these are from North America. Thus, there is a need to recruit volunteers. The North American group did not discuss WHERE an OAD node office should be located instead we focused on the issues discussed above.

Silvia Torres-Peimbert (Mexico), Postdoc Linda Strubbe (USA), and Graduate Student and NSBP Member Deatrick Foster (USA)

IAU Office of Astronomy Development Stakeholders’ Workshop – Day 1 December 13, 2011

by Dr. Jarita Holbrook
Tuesday December 13, 2011

The first day was an opportunity for stakeholders to provide quick descriptions of their activities and how they wish to contribute to OAD or make use of OAD. Each person was to have five minutes and two slides. All of the presentations were interesting. What I found informative was the reports from the various divisions within the International Astronomical Union: IAU Commission 46: Education and Building Capacity and IAU Commission 55: Communicating Astronomy with the Public. Both of these have several working groups doing work relevant to OAD. Where the American Astronomical Society is very active regarding the direct needs of research astronomers, these two IAU commissions have been far more active socially beyond the needs of astronomers.

There were several groups focused specifically in Africa: AIMS-Next Einstein, the African Astronomical Society, South African Astronomical Observatory, and there was an artist group doing work in the town closest to the Observatory in Sutherland, South Africa.

I was given two minutes to represent the National Society of Black Physicists. I shared the following:

There are three established task forces:

1. Astronomy for Universities and Research

2. Astronomy for Children and Schools

3. Astronomy for the Public

Today we will be meeting within these task force to brainstorm, keeping in mind the OAD mission: To help further the use of astronomy as a tool for development by mobilizing the human and financial resources necessary in order to realize its scientific, technological and cultural benefits to society. OAD Director Kevin Govender reminds us that astronomy is not the silver bullet to solve all the problems fo the world. We are also to consider the economic impact of our activities.

The Global Office of Astronomy for Development December 10, 2011

by Dr. Jarita Holbrook
Friday December 9, 2011

The International Astronomical Union has opened the Global Office of Astronomy for Development in Cape Town, South Africa. The OAD was officially inaugurated in April 2011. The new office is housed in a refurbished building on the grounds of the South African Astronomical Observatory headquarters. It is part of the thriving astronomy community in South Africa.

My trip to South Africa has three purposes:

1) To represent the National Society of Black Physicists at the first OAD stakeholders workshop, December 11 – 14, 2011. See http://www.astronomyfordevelopment.org/index.php/oadevents/oadworkshop.

2) To plan the next African Cultural Astronomy conference for 2014 in Cape Town.

3) To discuss the findings of my research on the South African National Astrophysics and Space Sciences Programme (NASSP) with NASSP instructors and administrators.

Today, my focus is on the workshop. What is exciting is that the workshop is structured in an unique way that includes participant input as to what talks they want to hear on the last day! People have submitted possible talks for consideration. Given my absorption with finishing my book on NASSP, I did not submit a potential talk topic.

My role in the OAD workshop is multifold: Working with Astronomy without Borders, Steward Observatory, and the National Society of Black Physicists, we first considered hosting the OAD in the United States, but ultimately chose to support the South Africa bid, which they won. However, there is the possibility of a USA OAD node, i.e. there is a chance of an OAD satellite office in the United States. Though I haven’t been part of any formal discussions this last year, I know that there is still some interest from US astronomers to have a local office. I think an office in the USA would give greater access to USA based funding organizations that might be interested in financially supporting OAD projects.

More about OAD: Though based in South Africa, it is a global effort.

OAD came out of one of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009) projects. There are many IYA2009 people involved in OAD and they will be attending the workshop. Through my IYA2009 involvement I know many of them.

From the OAD website:

“The mission of the OAD is to help further the use of astronomy as a tool for development by mobilizing the human and financial resources necessary in order to realize the field’s scientific, technological and cultural benefits to society.”

OAD specifically addresses for the first time how astronomy positively impacts society economically as well as intellectually. Astronomers often think about and foster connections to K12 education and the public, but rarely think about how astronomy can stimulate local economies. OAD seeks to foster projects that encourage local economies and, more broadly, stimulate development. Though there is a historic connection between astronomy and economic development, it has not been the goal of or of great interest to astronomers. Thus, OAD marks a major change in the way astronomers think about themselves, what they do, and their impact on society.

I’m looking forward to this workshop!

Southern Africa’s SKA Bid: A Worthwhile Investment June 14, 2011

By Congressman Bobby Rush

Southern Africa is quickly establishing itself as a hub for astronomy, scientific expertise and in doing so, is creating an unrivalled opportunity for the development of skills and expertise that will allow Africa and its people to be significant contributors to the global knowledge economy.

In 2012, a consortium of major international science funding agencies will select a location to house the world’s most powerful radio telescope, The Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The SKA promises to revolutionize science by answering some of the most fundamental questions that remain about the origin, nature and evolution of the universe. With about 3 000 receptors linked together and a total collecting area of one square kilometre, the SKA will have 50 times the sensitivity and 10,000 times the survey speed of the best current-day radio telescopes. The SKA will enable scientists to gain insight into the origins of the universe and provide answers to fundamental questions in astronomy and physics.

Currently, two locations are under consideration: Africa, under the leadership of South Africa, and Australia/New Zealand, under the leadership of Australia. South Africa’s SKA bid proposes that the core of the telescope be located in the Northern Cape Province, with additional antenna stations in Namibia, Botswana, Kenya, Mozambique, Madagascar, Mauritius, Ghana and Zambia.

South Africa has already demonstrated its excellent science and engineering skills by designing and starting to build the MeerKAT telescope, an SKA precursor telescope. Five years before MeerKAT becomes operational, more than 43,000 hours of observing time have already been allocated to radio astronomers from Africa and around the world, who have applied for time to do research with this unique and world-leading instrument. US astronomers are leading some of these research teams.

There is already active collaboration between the South Africans and UC Berkeley, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and Caltech on the PAPER and CBASS telescopes respectively, which are currently hosted on the South African radio astronomy reserve. Collaboration is also taking place between these US research institutions and the MeerKAT team on the development of technologies for the MeerKAT and US telescopes.

The SKA in Southern Africa represents an unrivalled opportunity to transform Africa through science and technology by driving the world’s best and brightest to the region, and providing the continent’s youth with a world-class incentive to study science and provide the world answers to the planet’s oldest questions.

The SKA in Southern Africa will create a critical mass of young people in Africa with world-class expertise in technologies that will be paramount in the global economy in the coming years. New technologies, scientific discoveries and infrastructure development taking place in Africa will contribute to the creation of entirely new industries and spur development in many fields of human endeavor, while transforming Africa as a major hub for science in the world and creating a new continent of opportunity for American business to cultivate and develop partnerships throughout Africa.

The construction of major science infrastructure in Southern Africa, such as the $2 billion SKA project, will also represents an important opportunity for U.S. business to cultivate and develop partnerships in the region that can lead to new technologies, new industries and economic development both here in the USA and throughout Africa.

The SKA represents a unique opportunity to accelerate the development of skills and expertise that will allow Africa and its people to be significant contributors to the global knowledge economy. We should support southern Africa in its quest to become contributors to global science and equal partners in the knowledge economy.

Bobby Rush is the U.S. Representative for Illinois’s 1st congressional district, serving since 1993. He is a member of the Democratic Party. A long-time advocate of increased trade with Africa, he has introduced H.R. 656, the African Investment and Diaspora Act, to advance the mutual interests of the United States and Africa with respect to the promotion of trade and investment and the advancement of socioeconomic development and opportunity.

Astronomy Festival in Bangalore, India December 9, 2010

by Dr. Jarita C. Holbrook

The Bangalore Association for Science Education and the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium have partnered to create the Festival of Astronomy: Kalpaneya Yatre 2010.  November 28 – Dec 7, 2010

The Bangalore Association for Science Education and the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium partnered to create the Festival of Astronomy. The Festival occupied the buildings and grounds of Nehru Planetarium. The Festival had four main areas filled with different aspects of astronomy. The entrance to the festival was a temporary addition to the main building spectacularly decorated with images of space and nebulae. The structure held a historical overview of astronomy.

The historical exhibit consisted of posters focused on particular astronomy achievements and early astronomers, there were a few artifacts such as early astronomy instruments, computer screens showing videos, and one end of the area was a big projection screen. The historical content began with Egypt and the astronomy associated with the pyramids and the Sphinx, then ancient Indian cosmologies and cosmograms, and the Nebra Disk and complex from Bronze Age Germany. Stonehenge was the last poster that was focused on a location and general knowledge rather than focused on a particular astronomer. The selection of astronomers presented start with the Greeks Eratosthenes, Aristarchus, Hipparchus, and Ptolemaeus; a nice addition is of Chinese astronomer Wang Zhenyi and the woman astronomer Fatima of Madrid. The Muslim astronomers are Al-Biruni and Ibn Ul Haitham. The astronomer timeline followed the standard Copernicus-Tycho-Kepler-Gallileo trajectory with the interjection of Somayaji. The trajectory eventually reached Einstein, but before reaching him there is a series of posters dedicated to women astronomers: Caroline Hershel, Anne Jump Cannon, and Maria Mitchell. Jai Sing II, the Jantur Mantar observatory, and the Madras Observatory mark the last mention of non-European astronomers and locations. The remaining posters focused on Newton, Einstein, Eddington, and Hubble, and one more woman astronomer: Cecilia Payne. It is clear that a lot of thought went in to including women astronomers and non-European sites and astronomers.  Each poster clearly revealed what each astronomer discovered that advanced our understanding of the Universe. Where was Chandrasekhar? In the next part of the exhibit: the main building.

The exhibits in the main building focused on our solar system. There were two models of the solar system, a demonstration of planetary motion, a demonstration of the weather bands of gaseous planets such as those found on Jupiter, models of asteroids, and a 3-D image of the Sun’s surface for viewing with red-blue 3D glasses. Chandrasekhar was found in the solar section where there is information about stellar birth and stellar death. There was a slide show that includes some of the Hubble’s greatest images including interacting galaxies, Einstein arcs, and of course beautiful star formation regions.

The third area was the favorite of my children: a free standing white tent that was filled with science demonstrations related to astronomy! The children were able to touch and explore the demonstrations with the help of the docents who were also school children. There were about twenty demonstrations including four telescopes that had their covers off to show the optics of refracting telescopes and the mirrors of the reflecting telescopes. Noteworthy were the demonstrations showing the detection of non-visible wavelengths of light: there were demonstrations for ultraviolet, infrared, and fluorescent light. Having recently given an introductory astronomy test where my students got the question on the relationship between distance and flux wrong; the three demonstrations on measuring flux, measuring the maximum intensity of the solar spectrum, and changes in brightness were well done. My personal favorite was a demonstration showing the ring-around-the sun effect using glass beads. The biggest crowds were in this area and it is the one area where my children wanted to return again and again.

The final area was an sunny yellow and red tent that was open for children to sit and listen to lectures on astronomy. A lecture on solar astronomy was taking place during my visit.

The Astronomy Festival had enough variety to keep everyone happy: a hall for those interested in the history of astronomy, another for the solar system, hands-on demonstrations of the physics related to astronomy, and live lectures with people knowledgeable about astronomy. If all this is not enough, there were planetarium shows on a variety of astronomy topics every few hours. What was unique is that the docents were school children who were very well trained in explaining the science behind the experiments. It is a great idea to have children teaching children!

Life in the Margins November 19, 2010

by Dr. Jarita C. Holbrook

This week I have been writing my annual report to the National Science Foundation on the Astronomy Networks project.  Since I moved into cultural astronomy, I have lived the life of an interdisciplinary scholar in the margins.  My behavior and choices are consistent with the research findings I discussed last week: women and minorities tend to find success at the margins of STEM disciplines rather than in the mainstream.  Life in the margins is not bad: I exercise my intellectual freedom, I have a positive international research reputation, and I have been attracting great students.  When I moved into cultural astronomy from the way other academics responded to me (somewhat condescendingly), I determined that I had to get external funding to be taken seriously.  Simply put, it is fine to do interesting research in unestablished areas between disciplinary boundaries, but getting external funding is the official seal of approval.  Many scholars have had the good fortune of having their place in the margins be moved to the center, for example Jeff Marcy and his planet finding projects.

I am co-PI with Sharon Traweek (UCLA) on an NSF funded project that studies women and minority astronomers and their professional networks.  We are studying how they get involved in big database driven astronomy projects that are mainstream and where they chose to make a contribution.  Are they central or on the margins? Where do they perceive themselves to be and do others agree?

For my part of the project, I have been focusing on the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (www.lsst.org).  The LSST has not been built.  It is estimated to be completed in 2012.  LSST when it is finished will break all the rules of big telescope construction, management, computing, and collaboration.  There will be no proprietary data, that is anyone and everyone can access the data soon after the observations.  Of course, having an internet connection and enough memory to handle the large images are necessary.

I have been involved in the International Astronomical Union’s new Astronomy for Development initiative.  Projects such as LSST will present a great opportunity for astrophysicists outside of Europe and North America to work with the best data available.  The catch is that they have to learn how to work with LSST data now, in order to be ready when the real data starts flowing.  International scientists need to get networked into LSST now! The LSST team has created a simulator that can be used to simulate what the data will look like.  The simulated data can be used to test if certain astrophysical questions are feasible given the physical parameters of the LSST and the data it will produce.  As with all aspects of the LSST project, the simulator is freely available.  LSST is the type of project that I can admire.

I’m involved in the formation of the African Astronomical Society.  At the upcoming IAU Symposium “Tracing the Ancestry of Galaxies – on the Land of our Ancestors” in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso, this December, the first meeting of the working group will take place.  I secretly hope that they will go ahead and announce the formation of the Society there.  If not an official announcement will take place at MEARIM2 – the second Middle-East and Africa Regional IAU Meeting in South Africa in April 2011.  The newly formed Society should work to make sure that African astrophysicists get involved in LSST.  Unfortunately, because I am in India I will not go to Burkina Faso.

The Astronomer Networks project is also an oral history project, so our interviews are tape recorded and will be edited for an online archive.  I have interviewed a dozen astronomers thus far, but this is far too few to draw any grand conclusions.  The graduate students and postdocs on the project have collectively interviewed a dozen more, still not enough data.  However, we are on our way and have discovered some interesting results that may change as we collect more interviews.  What I find most significant about the oral history part of the project is that most oral histories of astronomers focus on the old and famous.  Few include the young and becoming astronomers at a stage in their careers where they have committed to being part of a project that may or may not be spectacular.  Even fewer include self-identified minority astronomers, though many include a smattering of women.

In a reflexive loop, I am in the disciplinary margins studying astronomers in the margins after having been an astronomer not so in the margins.

I’m now in Bangalore, India, visiting the Raman Research Institute (www.rri.res.in).  Next week begins a ten day festival focused on astronomy at the local planetarium.  I plan to write an article about the festival for one of the popular astronomy magazines.

Professional Self-Image and Astronomy November 12, 2010

by Dr. Jarita C. Holbrook

My cultural astronomy project on navigation focused on why people today continue to navigate on the ocean using celestial bodies. A glaring question was why are people not adopting the Global Positioning System (GPS). There are many factors, many that are obvious such as batteries, as to why the GPS is not used in all navigating communities. However, after doing various calculations and listening to what the navigators said, I identified a new factor which is professional self-image. The question became: How do the navigators in this community image themselves to be in terms of their skills, the way they act, their values, etc.? I was most interested in the skills aspect of this question.

For my navigation study, I focused on three communities; and their professional self-image was different in each of these. Each community had a set of navigation skills and abilities that they considered to be essential to being a navigator. For example, on the Kerkennah Islands in Tunisia, the fishermen need to have a mental map of the seafloor features around the Islands to be able to pinpoint their location. Translating the relative depth of water to a specific location was a skill that the fishermen were proud of being able to do.

After my five years of studying navigators, I proposed a new hypothesis:

There are skills and abilities that are an essential part of the professional self-image of navigators, when a new technology is positioned to replace that essential part there will be rejection and/or resistance before adoption if adoption occurs.

My study of the United States Naval Academy (USNA) revealed a case of resistance and struggle between celestial navigation and the GPS. It is even more interesting because the GPS was developed by the Navy! Among Navy Officers, all are required to take celestial navigation classes and get certified (get a badge/pin) in celestial navigation, marking it as an essential skill. When it was proposed to remove celestial navigation from the USNA curriculum, there was struggle and resistance. At the end of my study, it was still being taught at the Naval Academy but in a stripped down form. The GPS is used by the Navy but so is celestial navigation, one is used to test the accuracy of the other. However, it is the old fashioned celestial navigation that is used to check the GPS!

There are many efforts underway to diversity Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Many efforts have had little or limited success. I have been on the Gender Equity Conversation Task Force run by the American Physical Society (APS) this past year doing site visits to physics departments in the United States. In conjunction with my film “Hubble’s Diverse Universe” I have visited several astronomy departments as well, where the bulk of our post film discussion focused on diversifying astronomy. I am currently studying the National Astrophysics and Space Science Programme in South Africa, which is also meant to diversify astronomy. Not to forget that I too am a PhD astrophysicists and have done time in some of the best astronomy and physics departments in the USA. I had struggled with and continue to struggle with the professional self-image of astronomers. I have to mention that the French sociologist Pierre Bourdeau studied academic culture (Homo Academicus) and I could couch much of my thinking about the professional self-image of astronomers around his term “doxa”.

Focusing on diversity, I have been busily identifying those factors that are part of astronomers’ professional self-image that impede if not halt progress towards diversifying astronomy. As an aside, consider that women and minority scholars in the USA tend to create their own success at the margins of disciplines. One reason may be that the professional self-image within disciplines is inflexible (concrete, frozen, rigid) leading to no possibility of diversity and no chance of success for diverse members.

As an example of this within astronomy, in the discussions that followed viewing my film, in some cases the audience spent a great deal of time ‘othering’ minority students: they are only interested in money (read they come from poor backgrounds), they are more interested in less intellectual fields such as engineering (no offense, these were not my words!), and they would not want to make the time-investment necessary to become an astronomer. These comments were instructive to me on another level: I’ll not be sending my children nor my students to them, even my non-minority ones!

I have developed a series of activities to be done by students and astronomy professors around professional self-image to bring some of the factors hindering diversity to the forefront in an effort to identify and nullify unconscious biases. Thus far, I have done the student exercise twice in South Africa. It was fun and the students (who were black and colored South African) could see why they felt uncomfortable, unsupported, and abandoned by their professors. It gave them a morale boost building their resilience to survive in the astronomy environment. However, the students cannot change astronomy culture – the professors can. I hope to test out my professional self-image exercises sometime soon among astronomy professors.

This is my last week in South Africa. I traveled to Pretoria to see NSBP’s Charles McGruder, the International Astronomical Union President Robert Williams, and Astronaut and MIT Professor Jeff Hoffman give a joint public lecture to promote astronomy. Astronaut Hoffman helped fix the Hubble Space Telescope way back when the images were still out of focus. His presentation was moving, especially since I had done the “Hubble’s Diverse Universe” film which is a minority tribute to the Hubble Space Telescope. Afterward, I gave him a copy of my film – bold of me? Robert Williams I knew from my visits to the Space Telescope Institute; he was surprised to find me in South Africa. I was surprised that Charles had not told him that I would be there. Dr. Williams talked about some of the major findings of the Hubble Space Telescope advancing astronomy and astrophysics. Dr. Charles McGruder and I have a long history. He and I are both Caltech grads, except he graduated the year that I was born! I did not meet him until I was working on my master’s in astronomy. At the time it was wonderful to connect with an African American astronomer who also had survived undergraduate life at Caltech (in 2006 I met a third Dr. Alphose Sterling). Dr. McGruder spoke about the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) and what it would mean if it were placed in Africa. South Africa has put in a bid to host the SKA, and dishes would have to be placed in other African nations as well, which would bring astronomy to new places in Africa. Australia is competing with South Africa for the SKA.

Back in Mafikeng, Dr. Thebe Medupe and I are putting together a proposal to host the 2014 Oxford Conference on Archaeoastronomy in South Africa in Mafikeng. We got letters from each of the major hotels with quotes of their estimated room rates – two days of work! Our last task is to get a letter of support from North West University then I think we are ready to go. The proposal will be presented at the Peru conference in January. I am nervous about it because I will not be traveling to Peru, I will be in Seattle at the American Astronomical Society meeting (AAS). We have tossed around ideas for the theme of the conference. Our favorite thus far is: “Astronomy, Indigenous Knowledge, and Interpretation.”

Dr. Medupe and I have been planning the future of the Timbuktu science project and the Astronomy document collaborative project. Both focus on documents written in Arabic found in Africa that contain astronomy content. The Timbuktu project has been running for several years, I started building a larger collaboration last year starting with Egypt. Many African nations have archives of Arabic documents; these have not been analyzed for their astronomy content. The larger collaboration would identify those archives that have astronomy documents and then set up teams to analyze the documents. I am building the collaboration as a collaboration, not as me and a bunch of Americans going and doing everything. I want local partners who are willing to work as co-Investigators. It has been slow going because with each new partner we have to write joint grant proposals to get funding. It would certainly be a lot faster to simply send in a team, but I feel strongly that true partnerships will make the project sustainable and benefit more people including leading to training more local (African) students.

African Cultural Astronomy November 6, 2010

by Dr. Jarita C. Holbrook

It has finally started to rain in Mafikeng, South Africa. I was here teaching a class on African Indigenous Astronomy to undergraduate students at North West University. My host is Dr. R. Thebe Medupe who is the Chair of the Department of Physics and Electronics. The class included a series of assignments designed to explore Indigenous Astronomy, the tension between astronomy and indigenous astronomy, the geography of Africa, and astronomy. The final assignment was a constellation identification quiz. Using a green laser pointer, each student has to correctly identify ten things in the night sky. However, not all of my students have been able to arrange to be on campus at night to take the quiz. Now it is raining….Class management environments such as D2L and Moodle are great for automating quizzes, homework assignments, etc. The North West University equivalent is Efundi. I am thinking of using Stellarium and other star charts to design an online constellation identification exercise instead of the quiz. I spoke to two students about it, and they are in favor. I will start working on Friday morning.

Next year is the 6th Science Center World Conference that will take place in Cape Town, September 4 – 8, 2011. Two weeks ago Mike Simmons of Astronomers without Borders www.astronomerswithoutborders.org contacted me about helping to create a session focused on Cultural Astronomy. He had just read the latest Communicating Astronomy to the Public Journal Issue which I edited (www.CAPjournal.org). The issue focuses on International Year of Astronomy 2009 activities that included a cultural astronomy component. Mike wanted to build on that idea for the conference panel. Working with Mike and Chris Phillips of the Imiloa Science Center in Hilo, Hawaii, we finally settled on a unifying panel theme for the conference: Indigenous Astronomy and the Public. I have to write the description for our submission. We will have speakers talking about the Indigenous Astronomy of Hawaii, Iran, and South Africa! However, they all haven’t said “Yes”, yet.

I just had a two hour Skype session with the host of Chapter, Verse, & Volume, Heru-Ka Anu. He is doing a review of “African Cultural Astronomy”. The volume came out this week in paperback…but it is the same price as the hardcover! In the interview which he will edit down to one hour, we talked about the text, African American astrophysicists, thinking like a scientist, Benjamin Banneker, and the disenchantment of the night sky in Africa. I’m not sure what will be in the final, but it will air this Sunday at 8 pm EST. www.blogtalkradio.com/herukaanu.

I am writing a short paper on African Cosmology this weekend. Next week Astronaut Hoffman is visiting Pretoria and I am going to be there along with NSBP’s Charles McGruder.

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