Let's try rant-free

So I actually tried to write today's post twice, but it just kept turning into a rant. Long story short? The book that was my task today was terrible. I wasn't its intended audience and I have no patience with a book that feels the need to speak corporate-eese instead of plain english. Especially when what it's saying boils down to, "Don't be a total jerk if you're a museum director and treat your visitors well. Also business goes more smoothly if your employees agree with your goals because they want to, not because they're scared of you because you're a complete dictatorial..." ahem. I wanted to keep this post free of angry rants... sorry.

So let's focus on something more positive. Last night was a stunning night and we got to use the 25" telescope--That refers to the diameter of the primary mirror. (If you prefer metric, hunt down a meter stick and whack off just over 1/3 of it.) The telescope was massive, maybe 10' long? Something like that. It took two people to make sure it got out of the building safely, due to its size. Not its weight, per say--it has removable wheelbarrow arms and a telescope is mostly empty space, this one even more so, it didn't have a tube--but the sheer awkwardness of the thing.

A 25" telescope like ours. Not ours--notice lack of mirrorage--but the general type.

25" is a big-ass telescope. So what can you see with a big-ass telescope?

The right image is HST's telescope, the left is what we saw, more or less. M82.

A lot of things.

I brought my star chart, so anything that was up, we could find. My dad likes a go-to telescope, because you can just plug the thing you want to look at in and the computer finds the thing you want to look at...but I'm not sure any of PARI's (relatively) portable telescopes have them. Besides! A go-to computer means you never *really* learn the sky. You may or may not be able to pick out constellations. (I know Corvus and Lyra now! Although I think they're making Draco up. I know where he is...but no, I can't see it. Hiss.) You almost certainly can't star hop, and that's...kind of fun, really.

What's star hopping? Here's a star chart from April. If you wanted to find the Orion Nebula, you can know (from a better star chart, or maybe you just know) that it's a bit below Orion's belt. You probably can't see it, but you can see Orion and his belt. You know which star it's "below" and which way Orion appears in the sky. In your telescope's finder window/scope/along the barrel/in the mirror you can line up that star and then go look in your eyepiece. From there, you can move your telescope "down" (while looking in the eyepiece) until you see the thing you're looking for, at which point you can play around with lenses, filters, whatever. 

We starhopped to M81, M82, the ring nebula, the whirlpool galaxy, and a handful of globular clusters. The whirlpool galaxy--M51--is cool, because you can *tell* it's a spiral, even in a ground-based telescope, even when it looks a little like this, only fainter and blurrier and you could only sort of see it like this out of the corner of your eye:

I thought it looked a little like a rose. Lovely. Truly. 

BUT! That's not the only thing up! We also saw the planets that are up--Mars, Jupiter, Saturn--and saw Mars in great detail. I should clarify: Detail on mars from a ground based telescope looks less like the hubble photos you've seen and more like this sketch--not mine, we couldn't see a polar cap:

Mind, this is a pretty clear sketch. You can see a roundish disk and some dark blobby bits on it. 

Saturn was fun--we could see the rings, and the planet, and three little moons. Jupiter, we saw three or four moons--one could've been a nearby star--and they had moved from the previous night. Saturn's had too: night before last, we saw four for sure, in a smaller telescope. 

The moon...was glorious. I did photograph that. 

First, here's a photo from the University of Alabama's 6" (I think) Dobsonian telescope. The moon was a gibbous, it just peeked out of the frame: 

Good detail, nice craters along the terminator, Tycho nice and clear...

And here's last night--It's only a crescent, Tycho wasn't up.

Ehrmagerd. (You might be able to drag the images into your address bar to see them larger, or look at my photo on Facebook.) We saw the moon in so much detail, I didn't even know that was possible...because I've never looked at it through a telescope that large. (This was easily the biggest telescope I've ever dealt with, by at least 3".) I think my comment was "Wow". 

Oh, and also for comparison, here's the moon through my little refractor during the eclipse last fall. The blue and yellow around the left edge of the moon are artefacts of the telescope, called "Chromatic aberration".  It's why most telescopes use mirrors to gather and focus the light, which are typically better about not introducing colour weirdness. It's because light travels slower in a medium, like a lens, and different frequencies (colours) are impacted differently. The photographs above, as well as most astrophotography you've seen, come from mirror telescopes like Hubble or the 25" dobsonian. 

Again, you can see Tycho and the maria...and that's it.

Also, the guy interns drove down to the vegetable stand at lunch and got some fresh veggies to throw in a crock pot with some chicken. I contributed chicken broth and some spices, my roommate some spices and some rosemary. It's nice to live somewhere where, if people cook, they're willing to make enough for everyone on the grounds that you'll reciprocate next time--I made mac and cheese on Monday and shared with anyone who hadn't eaten.

Tomorrow, I'm not working. Tomorrow, I'm off to UNCA orientation! woo!

On Rocks and the Museum Visitor Experience

So I finished the Falk book. And hoooooo boy those last few chapters were doom and gloom. Don't get me wrong; when it comes to addressing the types of people that visit a museum, everything seems sound enough. (I talked about that yesterday.) But the book was written during the 2008 recession and talk about pessimism for museums in general! Resources from 2012, 2013 are much more positive, so I'm inclined to somewhat discount those predictions. Except possibly if certain sweet-potato-coloured candidates take office...but that's neither here nor there.

Seriously, though. All museum-related books, being written by educators, contain a metric ton of rhetorical or semi rhetorical questions. I've posted many of them. This book's questions, taken directly:

• Do you really know why people come to your museum and what it takes people to visit?

• Do you know how to attract new and different audiences to your museum?

• Do you know what your visitors actually do in your museum and why they do these things?

• What is the one thing that you are not providing your various publics today that they are secretly longing for? 

• Do you know what IMPACT your museum has on the public, in particular what meanings visitors derive from their experience?

• Do you know what would make a visitor come again and again to your museum?

• Do you know how a new, or existing, competitor could take away your audience? 

Emphasis added to illustrate how some made me roll my eyes a little. Especially the "secret longing" one and the "audience theft" one.

What are people secretly longing for? HELL IF I KNOW. Hell if anyone knows! If they're coming here, there's a real chance they want to know about the underground cults and secret Men In Black base apparently housed at PARI. There's also a chance they were in Brevard and wanted the area science center, like space and noticed that there are basically no space museums in NC (at least, that I've noticed), wondered what the mysterious facility they drove by when they were kids has turned into (back when it DID have armed guards), or got lost in the mountains and are making the best of their situation.

On a lighter note--sort of literally--I learned what might be coming soon to the rocks part of the museum! (It actually has a dedicated curator, which shows.) Anyone ever tried shining a black light at a Sharpie Highlighter and noticed that it basically glows? That's the fluorescein contained in said highlighters, and as you might imagine, it fluoresces.

Stamps and Stakes of the Visitor Experience

My tasks for the day:

1. Read Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience by John H. Falk, to determine what sort of people are coming to visit the PARI facility. I intend to supplement this by talking to the people visiting the PARI facility, which seems like a decent random sampling method. I'm also fairly sure that nobody has actually done that yet, at least not for these purposes. 
2. Figure out what to do with these stamps. Or any stamps. Possibly including my collection, since I have more I can add. (in terms of some of the Apollo, Gemini, and International missions.) Figure out if it's worthwhile to do an exhibit on philately. Possibly show the stamps I have handy to any visitors I see, figure out if it's something of interest. (Excuse me sir/madam! Can I explain the significance of this 1992 postage stamp to you?)

These are the space related ones. There are...dozens of randoms as well.

Because, in addition to more rocks than anybody could...um...throw a rock at, a large collection of meteorites, a small collection of fossils, satellites, satellite models, antennae of all shapes and sizes, a lunar lander model, an Apollo-Soyuz model, a (loosely 20" tall) Saturn V model, and bits from the Space Shuttle... we also have two Sears-Roebuck boxes of stamps, which are presumably organised in a system only known to the original philatelist who donated them. 

15 of which I can conclusively determine are space related, three more which might be related to a satellite tracking facility that existed in 1976 Indonesia.

Or maybe not. My Indonesian is, as one might expect from a white girl in North Carolina, is basically nonexistent. 

What do I need to know?/Guest Observations

Out of PARI's collection, there are two things I'm now fairly sure would be good exhibit fodder:

1. How do we talk to/in space? (Using Rosman's history as a tracking station and the three or four antennas that are part of the collection, as well as the communications satellite. I think that's what it is, anyways. It's a little hard to tell.) 
2. Apollo/Apollo Soyuz. The 45th anniversary of Apollo-Soyuz is next year, which means that it's feasible to focus on that anniversary and use it as something of a dry run for the Apollo 11 50th anniversary (or A-S 50th), which is a bit further down the line. It also has press potential, since we have physical evidence of Rosman's involvement with A-S. 

That being said, I can't learn everything about How To Museum from books. I mean, I maybe could, but there would be trial and error involved. Better to get as much knowledge as possible (from limited and often outdated book resources) and keep the error to a minimum. Furthermore, part of my work plan involves hunting down actual people with actual experience and sorting out how they museum. 

Rosman Tracking Facility

What did Rosman Tracking Facility--PARI--do during the space race? It wasn't involved in voice-to-ground communications, unlike Houston, Honeysuckle, Vanguard, Carnarvon, or even Antigua or Guayas Mexico. But NASA felt the need to put up two 26-meter (75 foot) telescopes for...what?

Why are they there?

What purpose could a pair of huge telescopes in 30-minutes-from-Anywhere, North Carolina serve?

The astute will notice the brochure matches the facility's carpet. 10/10 for coordination, NASA.

So far, I have been reading the book, "Read You Loud and Clear: The Story of NASA's Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network", which may be one of the only sources available aside from contemporary science papers. The interested can find a PDF of the book here or can read a limited (but searchable!) version off Google, or can get a kindle version off Amazon... not, mind, that I expect anyone to be particularly interested. Unless you like reading about global 26-meter telescope sites. 

Rosman apparently had a sister facility--built at approximately the same time for approximately the same as-yet-unknown reasons--in Fairbanks, Alaska. The Fairbanks facility may or may not still be in use--PARI's website isn't the most user friendly, Gilmore Creek Tracking Facility leads to some HTML webpages that look to date to the early 2000's. What I can find suggests it dealt in communications? satellites, at least in part, and of the +35º latitude sites, Rosman and Gilmore Creek were the most useful. For...something. 

What I'm working with...

According to my research--and I've been doing a lot over the last three days--the worst possible museum is stuff in glass cases labeled "don't touch".

This is what I'm working with.

And it is entirely glass cases labeled don't touch.

The Space Junk Room

Parts of STS-121 (An ISS mission)

How Exhibits

So. What makes a science museum exhibit tick? (This is my first task: figure that out.)

Counterintuitive as it may seem, people learn more when an exhibit is interesting. A glass case with labeled rocks--we currently have a room of these, lots of these, so many rocks, oh god, oh god--won't teach anyone much of anything, unless they really like rocks and would learn if you just handed the things to them. Or, imagine why plenty of people find an art museum boring: it's just a bunch of paintings and objects labeled "don't touch" or "stay a foot and a half away from the art". You don't do anything with them. You don't interact with them. You see them, you might read the sign, you might linger in front of a few you really like, but you move on and forget most of the exhibit. Artists will get something out of the experience, and art historians, but I distinctly remember being pretty bored after a while when I was little.

Bueller.

Interactive exhibits that support the modern standards of learning are more interesting and informative. (I've been reading a lot of jargon.) Have you ever been to a science museum where you were meant to learn about tornadoes by looking at this misty cyclone that you could climb on? Or the Sue Rex traveling exhibit, where kids learn about palaeontology by uncovering dinosaur bones in a "dinosaur dig", where they chip away at a sandy plaster mix with a hammer and chisel to get to some encased full-sized raptor bone casts. I've been to both--some 12 or 13 years ago--and can picture them as clear as day. Or at the Huntsville Space and Rocket Center, visitors can climb inside a scale Apollo capsule mockup with two of their friends to flip switches and learn how cramped the darn thing was, which is a better way of learning than just seeing the Apollo 16 at the end of the hall.

Museums do not strictly speaking need to have a great deal of organization--you don't need the hall of man to be a separate entity from the collection on big-horned sheep--for visitors to still get the same stuff out of them, but it's useful to keep the staff sane and optimise a small space. (Like the two decently sized rooms I'll be working with). Organising around themes--Space Junk, Space Rocks, rock-rocks, and fossils--helps in that regard.

Copycatting layouts from successful museums is also a useful thing to do, although it's pretty obvious why copycatting from a museum within easy driving distance is probably not a great choice. (There's a rock museum a day trip away we should distinguish ourselves from, for instance.) It saves time, but isn't terribly helpful in the case of PARI. The nearest museum with a similar collection is either in Washington, DC (some of the collection is on permanent loan from the Smithsonian) or Huntsville, Alabama. Both the Air & Space Museum and Space & Rocket Center have something we don't have: Space for Space.

We do not have room for an Apollo capsule. Forget the whole rocket.

A museum display should provide the following for a visitor:

1. Its purpose. (To explain what the Space Shuttle tiles were and how they worked)
2. The cool science-y stuff. (A space shuttle tile is so effective, you can hold one in your hand and feel perfectly cool, even when somebody has a blow torch to the other side...which is red hot!) 
3. Some way for the viewer to interact with the exhibit (...to be determined.) 
4. Some method for the viewer to freely experiment with the presented display and information.

It can also be helpful to use different methods of forcing knowledge down people's throats. An artist can present images no photographer could ever manage, which may be useful to understanding a particularly odd concept. There is, after all, a picture-to-kiloword conversion factor. 

An earth-like moon around a saturn-like planet, two suns and an additional moon also visible

Art also gets people thinking about something differently, which can add to retention. Anything that gets people thinking about something differently, or again, or from a new and surprising angle, re-records the information in their minds and increases the likelihood of later recall. This is why taking your notes from a lecture, reading your notes over, highlighting important concepts, comparing them to the chapter, using them in your homework, and then reviewing them later means you're more likely to remember something! The same principles as in education apply--there's a lot of overlap between museology and science education. 

Which is nice, since I won't be able to fit the classes in for a normal education certification and if I want to teach after this whole undergraduate debacle, I'll need to do lateral entry. The background will certainly come in handy.