Home Stretch

Star Trek: Beyond was excellent. Go see it. We saw it *technically* a day early--it comes out today, officially--because of how the Brevard Co-ed Theatre works. They only have one screen and they cycle films through fast because it's the only theatre in Transylvania County (and will probably stay that way for the foreseeable future), and they don't do midnight premieres. They do 7pm premieres. Although, technically, they also do 3pm showings and 11am showings, so I assume the actual premiere was at 11am... Anywho. All the staff wore Star Trek shirts, I didn't even know the film was coming out this summer (...I don't actually know how I missed it...) so I got a lovely surprise, the new character was awesome, and the weapon used to defeat the alien (you knew that was going to be the plot, so this definitely doesn't count as a spoiler, it's Star Trek) was completely unexpected and thoroughly awesome.

If you're not into Star Trek, assume they used the magic of friendship. (They totally didn't.) Also enjoy the fact that as we waited to get tickets, an older gentleman cycled past in a propeller hat, ringing his bicycle bell. I love Brevard sometimes...

Today, among other things, I'm making an outline of my final presentation-to-the-staff. (Note to self: Talk to Steve about how he wants me to give them the digital files I've been working on. Nebula? Pachyderm? Burn them to a disc? USB? Floppy disc? The last might be challenging, since I can't use floppies on my computer and the file is WAY too large...) 

So far I have this order:

1. Start with successful museum examples and discussion of how museums in general have good practises, certain features, the basics of How Museums Do.
2. Describe the PARI galleries and how we could  do that, but don't. 
3. Segue into talking about PARI's collection and resources, tapped and untapped. 
4. Use that to move into the storyboard, starting with the map and list of exhibits.
5. Include things that would be nice to include, that we have the materials and/or history to include but can't due to space limitations. Don't make that pun. A small space science centre is cruel to comedy. 
6. After a more standard storyboard, give a virtual tour of what I got. That's going to be a little bit messy--sketchup does virtual tours okay...ish. But if they want better looks at any particular areas, I may or may not be able to give it to them. I'll try. It's a little unwieldy. Maybe I can put together a video? I'll have to explore this next week.

And I also spoke to Thurburn about what he'd like to see in an exhibit about our plate archive, since he's essentially the PARI god of glass plates. We came up with the bare bones for me to design something around--it won't be as complete as the others, I guess, although that's going to bother the stew out of me so I'll have to mull it over. 

We would like to include essentially two parts: 

A small part somewhere prominent, explaining what APDA *is* and where it came from, where the telescope images came from (thin air? hardly!) and how we ended up with them. Essentially a history section.

And a science section, which will explain how the plates are used

• to see stars over time
• stellar distances
• spectra and stellar classifications (among other things)

We can intersperse that with stuff that will basically teach the very bare bones of astronomy 101--how parallax works for measuring stellar distances, that kind of thing. 

Thurburn is rightly concerned about including original plates in the exhibit, since people are weird and scientists, being people, might want that random plate you chose to display. I propose we take advantage of the fact that we have an extremely high resolution scanner (1 pixel=nanometer scale) and make enlarged versions on something more durable than glass--like, say, that plastic laminate stuff they have in museums. You know, the stuff that's frequently used for hands on exhibits. Then we have something that looks good, is damage resistant, and the original plates lead happy lives in building 4 with the other plates. 

We could also potentially take advantage of the fact that Daniel spent his summer teaching the computers how to take the high res scans, pick out the stars in them, and then potentially turn them into an animated GIF. So we could create something like this, over a scale of years, using the plates to look at some interesting astronomical object--an expanding nebula or similar:

Except, well, not in color 'cause we only have black and white photos

Stick it in one of those digital photo frames maybe? Not sure. But I'll throw it in the design brief for that room, since I'll be able to accomplish a design brief if not the actual design. 

(Probably. Some of the other design briefs that already have happy, healthy designs might have to be temporarily moved to the back burner.) 

We have a citizen science project that uses APDA data to get people to classify stars. It isn't terribly user friendly, and they want to update it--it's called SCOPE, you can google PARI SCOPE (yes, that was intentional--I hope!) if you want to get involved. I won't direct you to it, since it is a pain in the ass and I don't think we actually use the data.

That being said, if they want to update it, they could probably use Zooniverse to create a more user friendly experience; it has some free (I think) project builder tools. I would like to get involved with that, but I don't have the time or expertise; maybe it would be good for volunteers. Or future interns. Or if people just have time... either way, it looks good, will readily support up to 10k visitors, and is free to use. But it would take time to set up--like...a lot of time. 

I'll run it past Steve. Chances are, if they want to redo SCOPE anyways, they'd be happy enough to find some website that will readily support at least part of the operation, without anyone having to code it. They'll have enough of a nasty time coming up with code to automatically isolate spectra.

Wait, what? 

Well.

SCOPE shows people black and white stellar spectra. Like this: 

It then asks people to classify stars based on those spectra. Sound hard? Sound wooly? Yes. I've messed around with a bunch of crowd sourced science projects, and it's one of the least user friendly I've had a chance to work with. 

It would be a difficult task to arrange that process in such a way that a twelve-year-old could understand it. Doable? Eh, probably. I wouldn't be surprised to see it on an internship thing next year--especially if I tell them it would be a good one. You would probably need somebody with a solid knowledge of at least one programming language (not that I'd know which, since I can't actually speak any of them) and solid public communications skills.

But I digress. I don't have time to pursue a whole new project. I need to finish this one, to the best of my ability. I'll include it in my recommendations, sure, but I'm a designer (well, a physics major who hasn't even taken Design 101) not a programmer! (I'm really not a programmer. But I'll leave a bug in their ear as part of my presentation next Thursday, so they can hunt down one for next summer.) 

Oh yeah! I'm presenting. Probably next Thursday. What will I do Friday? Hell if I know! Hang out? Hike? Explore the delightful town of Brevard? I doubt it'll be a problem.