Beijing Olympic park played host to the 28th triennial general assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) this August. I was delighted to get a chance to attend and talk about the education and outreach resources of LCOGT. I am also a member of an IAU task force for children and schools, so it gave me an excellent opportunity to talk to different outreach and education groups within the IAU. The general assembly is actually a lot of astronomy conferences happening simultaneously over the course of 2 weeks, attracting 2,500 astronomers.
I attended some of the sessions on massive star atmospheres (which was the subject of my PhD thesis - I was surprised how quickly it all came back to me) and asteroids and meteorites. I am particularly interested if we can use our all-sky cameras for detecting meteors and fireballs. However, I spent most of my time in the Communicating Astronomy with the Public and Astronomy for Development sessions. There are many different groups across the globe who run astronomy clubs, school workshops and teacher training events in many diverse languages. This was not only refreshing to experience but reinforced to me the importance of providing our telescope resources in way that is appropriate for all these groups. In many ways the conference has given me a lot of think about (particularly the astronomy-themed toilet paper provided by some Japanese delegates).
The reception of the scientific, technical and educational endeavours of LCOGT has been terrific, with scientists and communicators in astronomy clamouring to be involved. I presented the current state of our network and demoed some of our interactive resources: Star in a Box, VirtualSky, Observations, and Agent Exoplanet. Already members of the audience have started using and promoting them. I was very pleased that LCOGT had mentions in several other talks, including one by ESO's press officer.
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The day after the conference I was given the opportunity to present a couple of sessions at a Galileo Teacher Training workshop, taking place in the National Observatory in Beijing. Because of techincal problems, I had to rewrite what I had prepared almost in real-time which proved to be a rather exhilirating experience. We explored some of the Zooniverse projects, our own Agent Exoplanet and I gave them some ways to demonstrate exoplanet detection methods using volunteers and flashlights. I was particularly impressed by a 9 year old who explained the concept of redshift to the assembled teachers. It was my first time speaking through a translator, which was quite a novel experience (I owe a debt of gratitude to the excellent language skills of Hao Wang).
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One thing I will not miss about Beijing is the smog. On a few days it was so thick it penetrated the conference centre and was clearly visible in the halls and lecture theatres. I also won't miss the deep-fried spiders (which could be found on many 'street meat' stalls).
