WELCOME TO ASTRONOMY UPDATE FOR THE "PUBLIC CONNECTION"

An Outreach of Rice University
In partnership with the Houston Museum of Natural Science


NOTE: The Space Update software was completely overhauled for 2006 and 2010 with an improved layout and expanded content. This web page refers to an old version of the program that was used from 1996 through 2005. If you are looking for details regarding the latest version of the program, please go here.


To educate visitors about the Earth and Space Sciences, Rice University and the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences have set up interactive computer kiosks in the museum. The astronomy module for this contains mostly recent and some archival astronomical images that are downloaded from sites on the World Wide Web. The main kiosk in the entrance to the museum has an internet connection to our computers at Rice, allowing us to remotely update it. Rather than being a gallery of pretty pictures, our aim is to explain exciting results from multiwavelength astronomy soon after they are released.


The Astronomy Module

The images are arranged in a tree structure that is navigated by moving a cursor using a mouse, touchpad, or touch-screen to click on buttons on the screen. The top page of the tree (Figure 1) can be returned to at any time.


Figure 1: Top page.

The top page currently contains six buttons:

  • What's New is a selection of the most recently released images. Expanded What's New sections are also contained in the other branches.

  • Stars and Nebulae contains sections on Star Birth, Star Life, and Star Death.

  • Clusters contains sections on Globular and Open Clusters of stars.

  • Galaxies contains sections on Spiral, Elliptical, Irregular, and Active Galaxies, as well as Clusters of Galaxies.

  • All Sky contains maps of the whole Universe from radio to gamma-rays.

  • Movies contains movies based entirely on observations, movies based on numerical simulations, and artistic visualizations.

    Except for the All Sky section, on entering one of these a page of introductory text is displayed. After choosing a sub-section, the available images are shown as thumbnail icons; for example, Figure 2 shows a version of the What's New page in the Stars & Nebulae section.


    Figure 2: Example of What's New sub-section in Stars & Nebulae section.

    The visitor moves the cursor on to one of these thumbnails (the telescope at the bottom moves to point in the direction of the cursor!), and clicks to select it; a full-screen image is displayed along with a short caption. Longer text captions and credits can be overlaid if the visitor requests them. Figure 3 shows an example. We create these captions either by modifying the ones supplied with the image, or by writing them from scratch. For each picture, we provide the WWW address where we obtained the image (for example the STScI), allowing the interested visitor to learn more at a later date.

    Figure 3: Sample image, with information, and with credits overlaid.

    The All Sky section is set up differently from the others (Figure 4). It can be navigated either by going sequentially through the images from long to short wavelengths (or vice versa), or by clicking on a wavelength bar at the bottom of the screen. A semi-transparent page of information about each image can be overlaid by clicking the Info button.


    Figure 4: Example of the All Sky section.


    Museum Kiosks

    The interactive astronomy module was installed in the main kiosk at the entrance to the Houston Museum for Natural Sciences on 1996 March 1. On 1996 July 19 our own dedicated ``Astronomy Update'' kiosk was opened. The latter is a two-screen version, with the images displayed overhead on a large monitor.

    The kiosks bring the latest NASA images to a large audience, many of whom would not otherwise have access to them.

    The system is safe for unattended use (there is no access to the WWW and its inappropriate material).

    A portable kiosk containing the complete Space Update project (including Astronomy) has been displayed at several locations, such as NASA Headquarters.


    CD ROM Version

    We put the whole Earth and Space Sciences project including Astronomy Update onto CD ROMs and distribute it to schools. These are the same programs that are used in the museum kiosks, though they are frozen in time.

    The CD works both on Macs and PCs (running Windows). The program runs directly from the CD, or can be copied to the hard drive. The computer requirements are modest, and even schools with limited computing facilities are using our software.

    As a supplement to the regular class material, the CD is also used in the Astronomy 201 class at Rice University, which is the astronomy course for non-science majors. The students are continually impressed how rapidly their textbook becomes out of date!


    Acknowledgements The Public Connection Project was made possible by a grant from NASA, as part of NASA/Goddard's Digital Library Technology Project. Astronomy Update has also been funded by grants from the NASA Initiative to Develop Education through Astronomy (IDEA) program, by a NASA Education/Public Outreach supplement, and by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0123487.

    Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of NASA or the National Science Foundation.

    Ian Smith - 2009 October 28