My first Magazine Sky & Telescope - 04.2019

FOCAL POINT by Carl Lindemann Planting the Seeds of Wonder When it comes to successful outreach for a sky event, be careful what you wish for. AS WEATHER WORRIES FADED at our ments, we didn’t collect or disseminate contact information as well as we might have. Our ﬂ yers soon vanished, and we were reduced to telling people how to ﬁ nd us via Google. Better coordinating between instru- ments — allocating which was pointed at what planet and the like — would have helped direct guests from line to line. The greatest catastrophe occurred when a lady at my 111-mm APO got lucky and snapped a decent photo of Saturn with her cellphone. Suddenly, everyone tried to duplicate her feat, and the line bogged down. Next time: a single telescope with a smartphone adapter set aside for photography! In the end, though, we were thrilled. As totality took hold around 9:30 p.m., a uniﬁ ed shout rose spontaneously from the crowd, giving voice to our collective awe. For Aristotle, the quest for knowl- edge begins with such wonder. Towards 1 a.m., exhausted, we ﬁ nally packed up, musing about the seeds we’d planted. ¢ CARL LINDEMANN , an expat Ameri- can storyteller and community organizer, lives for clear, moonless nights in the Karoo, the desert outside of Cape Town. observing event last July 27th in the heart of Cape Town, a more terrifying threat appeared. How could a handful of our Astronomy Society of Southern Africa, Cape Centre chapter members, alongside a few counterparts from the South African Astronomical Observa- tory (SAAO), handle the crowds that began pouring in like a zombie apoca- lypse to witness the total lunar eclipse? We estimate we had as many as 3,000 visitors that night at the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, a large mall complex on the harbor. For hours on end, people cued up 50-plus deep at 10 telescopes. This Frankenstein was of our own making. So what in our outreach efforts worked — and what didn’t? We’d begun by gathering allied organizations. Our club works alongside SAAO, so that was easy. We coordinated event logistics with V&A Waterfront ofﬁ cials but also leveraged their market- ing team’s talent and media contacts. We then crafted a one-page, no-hype press release. As we noted, the event’s timing was perfect for our target audi- ence. We offered a free, kid-friendly event starting at 6 p.m. on a Friday night. Our chapter’s chairperson got the opening quote, followed by the SAAO’s Science Engagement Astronomer. The trick was including a closing comment from the venue’s marketing commu- nication chief. That turned a passive partner into an active participant. We were able to distribute the release in time for newspapers to pick the story up the weekend prior to the eclipse. The response was immediate. Local media hyped it as the “‘Blood Moon,’ Longest in the Century!” Interview requests followed from media across the country, and the BBC World Service took it global. Radio proved crucial. Many of our visitors heard about us from interviews on CapeTalk, the city’s dominant news/talk radio station. Social media was valuable, too: Our Facebook event page received some 220,000 pageviews, mostly by women in their 20s and 30s. Our prep worked so well that we found ourselves completely over- whelmed. The multitude came for the lunar eclipse, but star party staples — Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars — kept them enthralled at the eyepiece. With all of our team assisting at instru- 84 A PR I L 2 019 • SK Y & TELESCOPE

My first Magazine Sky & Telescope - 04.2019 | Page 86