Renae ... two questions.  What is your role in the project?  Also, what has been the most exciting aspect of the project for you personally?

Hi Tim! I am a member of the Leadership Team of Big Astronomy. I help build the project and dreamed of the show that California Academy of Sciences so masterfully created! My most active role now is managing and hosting our live event series that directly connects viewers with staff who work at the science facilities featured in the show. We call the series Real People, Big Astronomy, and you can see many videos of the conversations on our YouTube channel (linked above). The most exciting part of the project for me has been having so many fun conversations with people who work in various STEM careers. I have learned a lot and been inspired by all the talented folks I have spoken with, with so many different backgrounds.

Ryan ... what do you think was the greatest challenge in producing the film "Big Astronomy: People, Places, Discoveries"?

For our team at the California Academy of Sciences, the greatest challenge was figuring out how to capture the critical real-world environments in the show. We wanted to show people working in these amazing places, and that meant finding camera technology that could deliver the quality of imagery that we wanted.

For more about our production process, you can watch this “cosmic conversation” we hosted with members of the production team.

Dr. Schmoll ... this is interesting work. What are some examples of how other planetarians will be able to apply your findings to benefit their work?

Hi, Tim. I think that you all are doing an amazing work. I would like to ask you... what was the most challenge you had when you traveled to the observatories in Chile?

Thank you Gabriel for visiting and for your question.  I think the most challenging thing about visiting the observatories in Chile is the weather. You have to be flexible with your schedule and be prepared to pivot quickly. Not only does the weather disrupt the film crews schedule, it disrupts those who work at the observatory. So, a single change due to weather can result in many changes downstream.  The people at the observatories were super helpful and worked with the Big Astronomy team to mitigate the impact, and we are very thankful for that.

Gabriel! I missed your question earlier, but I have to say that the biggest challenge the production team ran into was a snowstorm at the ALMA high site—at one of the driest places on Earth! It caused a complete rejiggering of an already tight schedule. 

We managed to get all the shots we wanted at 5,000 meters above sea level, but on the last day of videography at altitude, we only had one oxygen tank for the entire team! And one of our key team members wasn’t allowed to the high site because his blood pressure was too high (can’t imagine why). So many interesting obstacles to overcome in producing the planetarium show…

Thanks for your question.

Greetings, Billy! Thanks for asking about our lessons learned.

I’ll defer to Shannon about some of the learning from audience evaluations, but I can describe a little bit about the technical hurdles we overcame to deliver the show as a 360° experience. We plan a short white paper on this for the planetarium community, but we learned a bit about formatting content and setting up the open-source OBS platform for YouTube. We wanted to replicate the experience of going to a planetarium to see a show, so we focused on delivering one-off showings that people had to tune into—rather than just putting a 360° video online and letting people find it. We definitely didn’t get much traction with the planetarium community in delivering their own 360° streams, but we managed to get quite a few people engaged in the 360° streams we offered.

I’ll just note that an interesting arena for future work is the interplay between planetarium offerings and 360° content on streaming platforms. For example, is a 360° experience online a replacement for a dome experience—or an enticement to go to your local planetarium?

Thanks Ryan! It's so interesting to hear how you are thinking about how the online and planetarium experiences can complement each other. I think there are parallels in how many museums are now thinking about their online and visitor experiences differently after the COVID-19 experience.

I recently attended the MuseWeb 2021 conference sessions, and I found it interesting that everybody is thinking about this… But we’re all still trying to figure out what it looks like as we come out of the pandemic. And how we continue to offer virtual experiences once our doors are reopened and we’re serving guests onsite, often with reduced staffing. Tricky stuff.

Thanks Stephen for you comments and for taking time to watch the video!  I agree ... there's lots to learn here from the research that has and is evolving. As far as incorporating indigenous cultural funds of knowledge into the experience, the film, although a short segment, does have a powerful moment in the Atacama desert with an indigenous knowledge holder. In addition, we have hands-on activity the features stories of the stars from different cultures.

Re “the personal remote experience versus the theater dome experience,” we’re going to have an interesting opportunity with our audiences coming up—at least with members of the California Academy of Sciences. Our members attended numerous virtual 360° screenings of Big Astronomy over the past six months, and now that we’ve reopened the planetarium, we are seeing some of them come to the dome to see the show again for the first time. This is an interesting group, representing people who’ve experienced the show in two different ways.

Ideally, we’d also find people who experienced the show first in the dome, then as a 360° experience, but it’s not clear how we achieve that.

Shannon can address specific findings, but for some audience members who were familiar with the planetarium environment before seeing the 360° version of Big Astronomy, they found the online experience to be pleasantly reminiscent of the dome but not a replacement for the dome.

Thanks Shannon for sharing your findings in progress! It's so interesting to hear about some of the unanticipated benefits of the online experience, and how it can be a complement to (rather than a substitute for) the in person experience.

Thanks, Shannon, Looking forward to digging deeper when your results come out.

I’ll defer to my colleagues about some of our Zoom events, but for the planetarium content, we tried to replicate the experience of going to a theater to see a show. So we scheduled 360° livestreams on YouTube (Facebook doesn’t have robust support for 360° content, unfortunately), and we took the shows down slightly after the stream ended. Someone who joined late could see the whole show, but you couldn’t go back and watch it after the fact.

For the California Academy of Sciences streams, we included a live portion highlighting research in Chile—and we included a live call to action to visit the bigastronomy.org website to explore more. We also answered questions live in chat.

Hi Katie, we have two educational resources full of activities as well as a flat screen version of the show. The Educator Guide is geared towards middle school students. And the informal activities are designed for families and can be approached from a variety of skill levels. The Clues to the Cosmos activity is a great example of bringing a very hands-on activity to life online using simple tools. You can see a short video of it in action and get the full activity write up (just 4 pages!) on the website. 

One lesson learned from my perspective, to be completely honest, is that we could have used project manager devoted to the project. Even a part-time project manager.

Each one of us managed our own component brilliantly—and we collaborate well as a team! But the small-scale tasks such as planning a conference presentation or organizing a video required one of us to step forward to manage it. That created inefficiencies that could have been corrected by having a cross-cutting project manager.

That said, you can get a lot done with mutual respect and understanding (particularly in the time of a global pandemic) coupled with consistent, quality communication.

I'll agree with Ryan that communication has been key! We keep a standing meeting that all of us try hard to attend. Finding each of our roles in the project and owning them, but also being willing to assist and back each other up has contributed to our success.

Hi Corrie. The original model we were going to research was based on creating opportunities beyond the dome to support continued engagement. One way was through the hands on activities that museums, planetariums, and other organizations could use immediately around a show as well as additional resources on our web portal and live social media events. So there has always been a scaffolded element beyond the show itself. Others can speak more about the changes needed for these in light of the pandemic, but there were always there in some form. 

Hi Corrie, we had incorporated citizen science and other activities to take home from each hands-on activity, but hadn't planned to make each one virtually engaging. And in fact, a few that require the night sky wouldn't benefit from a screen! In some cases, we made connections to great online activities that cover similar concepts, and in others, we combined new technologies, like the filter for smartphones in Clues to the Cosmos to turn an activity that required these physical filters into an activity that extended beyond an event and into the home. I hope to keep making these more useful as technology progresses! 

Scott, you have made my day with your comment! Thank you for participating and for sharing the programs with your students. It is our goal to help people understand just what you say - that it takes all sorts of skills and backgrounds to operate big science facilities and enable discoveries. I'm very glad the series has been valuable to you.

Thank you for your kind words! We conducted 29 interviews in both English and Spanish, and those form the backbone of the planetarium show. If you want a flatscreen version of the show, we are providing a version to educators (and we’ll eventually have it available on streaming services), so you can request a copy under the Show > Classroom Edition option on our website. We’ll also be adding edits of some of those interviews, featuring footage that doesn’t appear in the show, very soon.

Scott ... Thanks for your comments. It's great to hear your story about how the resources are being used and having an impact at the community college level. One of the great think about the Big Astronomy resources is their application in both informal and formal education environments. Thanks again!

Thanks Mitch for the comments and glad to hear you enjoyed the show!  It's great to hear that you folks were able to remain open and share the show with your audiences from Sept-March. Question, are you planning to show the show again at some point in the future?

Thanks, Mitch! We’re thrilled that you could kick things off with us in a real-world planetarium on the opening date! And I’m glad to know the show is working out for you and your audiences.

I remember you talking about the show during my visit to the California Academy of Science while it was in production  deadline to finish Big Astronomy. Every time I see the the yellow ALMA transporter sequence I am taken back to that pre-pandemic day and the story you told on how you got that shot.

Thanks for taking the time to review the project, Leigh! And it seems like the pandemic has made the informal learning community think deeply about how remote experiences complement our mainstay real-world experiences (even virtual real-world experiences such as planetariums). I attended several sessions at the recent MuseWeb conference hoping to hear how others are approaching these topics, and while I can away with very few solutions, it was great to know we’re all asking the same questions.

I like the idea of framing the question in terms of incremental value. What can we achieve onsite in a museum or planetarium that we can’t online—and vice versa? At least in my experience, we asked these questions more philosophically a year ago, and they became far more germane in the last year.

And if you liked the shots in Chile that appear in the video, you need to see the show in its entirety in a dome! I hope we have the opportunity to share it with you at some point.

Will look forward to that Ryan!

Completely agreed about building and taking advantage of momentum, Tim. For a while now we've been providing classroom curriculum to extend the field trip experience as well as a digital field notebook to try to help carry the experience into home environments. As you note, we've seen incremental learning of key concepts and comfort with practices -- perhaps predictable since sometimes "more" actually IS "more." Going forward we'll be exploring how a virtual version of the experience particularly supports learners who find the content challenging. For example could emergent English learners or neurodiverse learners come into the field trip with more significant background knowledge, helping them have a better experience in-person. Interesting to ponder but we do find it hard logistically to orchestrate anything ahead of the field trip at scale.

Thanks Leigh for the additional information.  I do agree that a big challenge is the logistics related to preparing visitors in advance for field trips. This is an area where informal education and formal education needs to work together. Very often I think we place formal education in one box and informal in another box and it sometimes prevents more robust collaborations.  While there are certainly difference between the two, we are both fundamentally trying to do the same things ... educate, inspire, motivate, etc. ... we are just using different tools/experiences to do it. Thanks again ... you ask some interesting questions!

Connecting formal and informal learning is at the heart of everything we do, so I'm right there with you! Congrats on such a great project!

Thanks Leigh for your comments! This connection between the field trip and beyond is always an interesting one. We definitely know for sure that preparing students for what they see prior to coming reduced novelty effects so the cognitive load is then focused on the learning and less on the navigation/ Even showing some pictures or a map is effective. Curriculum that builds the field trip into the middle of it with a clear connection between what they are doing in the classroom and on the field trip is helpful. With this project, regardless of virtual or in person work, we are looking to really scaffold the extension of learning beyond through the additional resources as a means of building that momentum but with general audience members that do not have the advantage of a classroom to go back to. But it was build a lot of this work from K-12 field trips was well and there may still be lessons to apply back to K-12. Education is really more of a spectrum of informal to formal and there is always overlap. 

Thanks Nickolay for your comment!  I agree ... I think the pandemic created a unique opportunity that forced us to develop and implement tools and techniques to address the need. Moving forward, it will be interesting to compare impact on both the participants and the providers when it comes to in-person vs. virtual experiences. My sense is that various hybrid models will get us the greatest impact per dollar spent. I've enjoyed looking at the other videos and see what others have done. Lots of great stuff out there!

Thanks Nickolay! Our research definitely had to pivot from how we collected data to what kind of data we were collecting and we are hopeful that we can add some evidence based work to that conversation. The great thing of this project has always been about extending informal learning beyond the planetarium so we already had these great resources planned that were meant to be used at home in a way. How we presented the show and hands on activities had to adapt, but the silver lining is that we will have some amazing lessons learned to use post pandemic. That is true of our project and so many others in this showcase!

Thanks Martin!! We appreciate your guidance throughout the process. 

Indeed, thank you for helping advise on the project and think into how we could find synergies among the many facets of the project.

Thank you Byron for you comment!! Ryan and team at California Academy of Sciences did a great job leading the show production piece of Big Astronomy, as well as the creation of this 3-min video.

Thanks Samara! I am so glad this brought back memories. It's a wonderful place!

Thanks Sam!  Glad to hear you enjoyed the video.  I'm always impressed at the ability of this film to take me back to the observatories. Ryan and team did a great job producing the show in an authentic way.

I hope you have the opportunity to see the planetarium show in a dome! The immersive scale of a planetarium can make you feel like you’re back inside a giant observatory dome…