Astronomy is often said to be one of the oldest sciences of humanity. But this statement disregards the fact that the word “science”, as it is understood today, can hardly be used to describe the astronomical practices of, for example, the builders of megaliths or the ancient Egyptians. This type of astronomy, however, was always “culture” as it was closely linked to both religious and profane practices that led to better use of resources and greater understanding of the cosmos. Cultural astronomy, in its two branches of archaeoastronomy and ethnoastronomy, studies these practices. Since these are disciplines that lie somewhere between social sciences, especially archaeology and anthropology from which they obtain their epistemology, and classic astronomy, from which they obtain their mathematical tools, it is not always easy to carry out research in them. It is therefore often essential to start out by distinguishing between fact and fiction.


One of the main objectives of the IAA since the last decade has been the necessity of communicating its scientific activity to the public, together all the relevant information of general astrophysical interest that may reach to the public. A continuous collaboration with daily written press, in magazines of general scientific spreading and specific to astronomical information, together with the publication of especial editions and supplements, and the edition of our own magazine “Information y Actualidad Astronomica”, conform a conspicuous presence in the written media. In this contribution we review the main activities that the IAA has carried out in the recent years within the field of scientific communication in the written press media, and present several of the new challenges that we have ahead.

The oldest organization of astronomers amateurs in Serbia is the Astronomical society “Rudjer Bošković” which in 2004. celebrates the 70th aniversary. The Society has People's observatory which in 2004 celebrates 40th jubilly, planetarium and publish the journal for astronomy “Vasiona” (Universe), which 50th aniversary has been celebrated in 2003. Here is given a review of the history and development of Society and an overview of its activities.


In past centuries, astronomers have used a very wide range of techniques to explain what they are doing, how, and why it was worth doing to their equivalents of sponsoring agencies, voters, and students. We here examine an inital set of seven examples of seemingly successful communication, each with lesson to offer, and then, more briefly a wider range of examples, some apparently very good for their purpose and a few that were perfectly awful.


Since its opening back in november 1993 the Planetarium of Pamplona has gone a long way creating activities related to teaching and communicating Astronomy, Science and other areas of what we call Culture. In this poster we present a summary of some of the most relevant activities that have had an special relevance throughout these years. We will refer to our “School of Stars” in which more than 400 000 students have already been involved and other activities that have been very appreciated by our visitors.


For several years we have been using urban space, with its squares, monuments, astronomical observatories and ancient ruins, as “educational space” in order to take school into large open-air spaces renowned for their history and cultural importance outside the premises of the school itself. So that this practice, whose validity and effectiveness for teaching will be demonstrated in what follows, may be more frequently experienced with students, we hold that it is necessary to put it forward to trainee and practising teachers in order that they are able to employ it with their students.

The Night of the Vampire is one of the last A/V show we presented in this planetarium, which is specifically thought for children. In this oral presentation we'll talk about this Pamplona Planetarium production. We'll point out the special A/V treatment that we have done in it. Moreover, we'll talk about some of the activities related with teaching and communicating Astronomy that we make in an ordinary way at this planetarium. We are focusing our attention on the School of Stars, the main activity of this planetarium from its begining since 1994.

A survey of outreach related beliefs, attitudes, and activities of the Spanish professional astronomers is presented. More than one hundred scientists answered an ad-hoc drawn up questionnaire, whose results have been analysed statistically. This feedback form is an improved version of that used in a previous research carried out by the authors with a sample of members of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (Díaz Vilela & Rodríguez Hidalgo 2005). Some of the studied items are the actual time and effort devoted to outreach by a researcher, the role of outreach within his work, the valuation of outreach activities in his curriculum, socially, or economically, the opinion about who should have the responsibility of organising and performing popularisation tasks, etc. Three kinds of studies have been performed: the descriptive one is based on the frequencies and means of variables; a Principal Component Analysis was applied to get a shorter number of belief-attitude dimensions; and an inferential one, derived from a Multiple Regression Analysis which provides a reliable description of the beliefs-attitudes scale grouping outreach related beliefs into 6 components, 3 of them more significant. A simple regression allows us to predict about a 50% of the variance of the outreach practices.

Astronomia.pl is non-profit internet portal. It's mission is education and popularisation of astronomy. The website was created in November 2001 and quickly became one of the most popular astronomical internet services in Poland. Nowadays it offers over 20 sections. These sections are standard portal features like news, discussion forum, galleries of images, as well as unique ideas, like virtual library of astronomical master thesis. The portal owns several internet domains: astronomia.pl – the main portal, kopernik.pl – biographies of astronomers, astrowww.pl – collection of astronomical websites created by astronomy amateurs. Recently the portal obtained patronage from Polish Association of Astronomy Amateurs. Astronomia.pl supports many astronomical events in Poland. The address of the website is www.astronomia.pl.

Presentation of questionnaires carried out on Polish Astronomy Portal websites. There was over 80 questionnaires during 2 years period. As most part of users visiting this website are astronomy amateurs, we can assume questionnaires give a picture of astronomy amateurs community. Questionnaires can be divided into four main thematical groups: profile of users (age, sex, activities), what do they think about controversial astronomical problems (is Pluto a planet?), what are their likings (favorit star, most beatiful planet) and “business” questions (how did they find our website?, how many astronomical services do they visit regularly?).

We present a summary of the last activities of science communication that have taken place in the Observatorio de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM Observatory) on the occasion of the Third Science Week of the Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid (3–16 November 2003), including guided tours through the observatory facilities, solar observations, and several talks. Moreover the current telescopes, instruments and tools of the UCM Observatory have allowed us to organize other communicating activities such as the live observation, together with its internet broadcast, of total lunar eclipses and other exceptional astronomical events as the Venus transit that took place in 8 June 2004.


1967 was the year of the so-called “war of the six days” or “third Arab Israeli war”, the year of the Che Guevara's death in Bolivia, the year of the military coup in Greece and, in medicine, the year of the first human heart transplant. Moreover, the signing of the international agreement on the use of space with peaceful means and the crash of the Russian shuttle Soyuz-1, with Cosmonaut Vladimir Kamarov on board also happened that year. Likewise, Spanish writer and professor of journalists, José Azorín, passed away. However, here we are interested in 1967 because it was the year of the detection of pulsars, which astronomers initially confused with signals from extraterrestrials or Little Green Men. Nowadays, they are still present in the headlines.



A web site devoted to the astronomical information has been available at the Departament de Astronomia i Meteorologia at Universitat de Barcelona since two years ago. This web site is also used to broadcast astronomical events as eclipses or transits. In this paper we summarize the main activities carried out until now.

An attempt to write a story entitled the Origin of Stars now fails to meet the facts. There is no coherent storyline and our attempts to split and analyse the stages fails to take into account that we deal with a Complex System. How can we approach this subject with a text comprehensible to a wide readership? I here discuss the problems and my approach. Web galleries provide a means of reaching a broader range of communities.

In order to increase in Spain the social interest in the study of interplanetary matter (asteroids, comets and meteoroids) we created the Spanish Photographic Meteor Network (SPMN) in 1997. This network has been dedicated to studying interplanetary matter with participation of researchers from three universities (Universitat Jaume I, Universitat de Barcelona and Universitat de València), the Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía and it is also supported by the Atmospheric Sounding Station at El Arenosillo (INTA-CEDEA) and by the Experimental Station La Mayora (EELM-CSIC). In order to promote the participation of amateurs, our homepage (www.spmn.uji.es) presents public information about our research explains how amateur astronomers can participate in our network. In this paper we give some examples of the social role of a Fireball Network in order to give a coherent explanation to bright fireball events. Moreover, we also discuss the role of this kind of research project as a promoter of amateur participation and contribution to science. In fact, meteor astronomy can become an excellent area to form young researchers because systematic observation of meteors using photographic, video and CCD techniques has become one of the rare fields in astronomy in which amateurs can work together with professionals to make important contributions. We present here some results of the campaigns realized from the formation of the network. Finally, in a new step of development of our network, the all-sky CCD automatic cameras will be continuously detecting meteors and fireballs from four stations located in the Andalusia and Valencian communities by the end of 2005. Additionally, during important meteor showers we plan to develop fireball spectroscopy using medium field lenses.

The tension between contemporary astronomy and traditional topics as subjects for general astronomy courses or fundamental science courses is healthy, but one must worry if either type crowds out the other. Too often only topics understood hundreds of thousands of years ago (such as gravity, tides, phases, and seasons) take up such a large fraction of the astronomy content that few or none of the fascinating and important discoveries of recent centuries not to mention recent years or months are included. I discuss aspects of this problem. Including topics of contemporary interest often motivates students to concentrate their attention and study time on the entire range of topics in the course. Practitioners of the new field of Astronomy Education Research seem often to attack their subject in perpendicular fashion to the methods of practitioners of communicating astronomy to the public. I also discuss some of the content of our International Astronomical Union's Commission on Education and Development's special session from 2003 on Effective Teaching and Learning of Astronomy, and of the forthcoming volume of the same title to be published by Cambridge University Press. I further discuss the role of inspiring events, such as George Ellery Hale's inspiration from the 1882 transit of Venus and the potential from the widespread observation of the 2004 transit of Venus and of solar eclipses.


Cosmoeduca is an educational project set up by the Canaries Astrophysics Institute (IAC), with the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, for teachers of all subjects at secondary school level.
During this talk we shall discuss (a) How it all started, (b) What we hope to achieve and (c) The past, the present and the future.

The “Aula del Cel” is a project carried out by the Astronomical Obsevatory of the University of Valencia, Spain. It offers high-school teachers a tool for teaching Astronomy to 10 to 17 year-old students. Different programs, experiments, and audiovisual presentations have been prepared by a team formed both by professional astronomers and teachers, and are offered in a format chosen to suit each particular age and curriculum group. Special sessions have been designed for students with special needs (for example blind or autistic children) in close contact with the pedagogical teams responsible for their education. Nearly three thousand students have already visited the “Aula del Cel” over the first six months that it has been offered to the school community.