Never heard of Astrocom? Interested in robotic telescope education? Or working with data in astronomy more generally?
Not sure whether you should attend or not? JUST TURN UP TO THE MONTHLY MEETING! (sign up for mailing list) The zoom meeting is open for anyone, novice or expert 🙂 The time and date of each meeting is sent out monthly to the mailing list and posted on the website.
THE DISCORD SERVER IS ALSO AVAILABLE! (discord) for asynchronous communication at any time or date.
The community of people who work with telescopes with students are a diverse bunch of people! However, they are also usually working in isolation or small groups spread across the globe. This is especially true of school level and small community college teachers. We realised there was a need to provide for such a group around 2018 (see the paper here: https://rtsre.org/index.php/rtsre/article/view/8) and the need has only grown since then.
There are opportunities to meet up in person here and there (e.g. AAS, AAPT, ASTROEDU, RTSRE, IAU meetings amongst others) but these are usually at least one year apart from each other. These are also geographically convenient for some and not for others. There is also a significant cost involved for attending which, again, impacts school level and small community college teachers and students more than others. To add further complexity, attempting to thread the needle such that the dates of a physical in-person event simultaneously falls on times that are accessible to each attendee is impossible. Despite this, in-person events tend to be by far the highest rated experience in forming communities, groups and matching people to goals and projects of any variety.
Outside of these in-person events which trigger off much activity in the community, how do we keep the momentum moving? And how do we provide for people who cannot travel or attend the in-person events? This is where the Astrocom monthly zoom, discord chat server and website come in.
- The monthly zoom is intended to be a free regular open forum to share ideas, issues, problems and stories with formal and informal organised talks as well.
- The discord is intended to be an asynchronous chronologically organised chat and communication function accessible either through the website or through your own discord app to keep in contact outside of the monthly zooms and physical meetings.
- The website is intended to be a more static, occasionally updated website containing relevant information and links for newcomers and experts alike to the various broader parts of the community.
Please, join the mailing list and the discord and get involved and meet some like-minded souls 🙂
Monthly ASTROCOM public Zoom Meeting.
The date for the next monthly ASTROCOM public Zoom Meeting is Saturday, February 15, 2025. 3:00 pm until 7:00 pm PST. (Check your timezone here)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/8302053103
Meeting ID: 830 205 3103
Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/RCWMG
Educators
Our community helps to connect K-12 teachers, community college, university and out-of-school educators to astronomical instrumentation and guidance for education purposes
Observatories
Our community helps to bring an audience and an active userbase to your astronomical observatory and/or telescope network.
Scientists
Our community helps you to connect with suitable instrumentation and people with whom you can undertake and mentor research projects
COMMUNITY RATIONALE
ASTROCOM is intended to serve as an online community platform to meet, connect and plan virtually. If there was anything learned from recent robotic telescopes and student research conferences is that there are many researchers and practitioners working in a variety of different fields at different levels that really needed to communicate but had yet to have the opportunity to.
Conferences, while being regular annual or biannual events, are a great place to meet up occasionally. Outside this, to share our stories, attempts (both successful and…. less successful) and lessons learned we require a more sustained online social and collaborative network to continue the conversations and collaborations over time. Please consider signing up to make connections and share experiences with our growing community!
Sign up to the mailing list and the discord!
Joining the community is as simple as signing up to the mailing list to be reminded about upcoming zoom meetings and joining the discord server either by the discord button on the lower right or by using this link!