I have previously posted on the International Year of Astronomy - and I had kind of a mixed reaction to IYA overall.
Having stumbled upon the IYA website back at the beginning of January, my main reaction to it was that at the time, it was pretty heavy on bureaucracy, and pretty light on things that I thought would actually help astronomy EPO. I didn’t just seagull the IYA - I offered constructive criticism.
Today I learn that Pamela Gay, one of the really truly helpful people in the world of astronomy education, has been hired into the IYA’s bureaucratic apparatus.
Let me say as clearly as possible: This is a good thing. A very good thing. This single move gives IYA more credibility in my mind than anything I’ve heard so far, including things the two people associated with it left as comments on my previous post.
Pamela recalls some painful experiences she’s had in the past turning FITs images into play-nice JPEGs and other “standard” pc/mac image formats. I’ve had exactly the same problems. And she reports that NASA/ESA/ESO have come out with FITsLiberator as a Universal Binary (and Win compatibility too) - which is relevant to me, since I’m now doing most of my work of a new Macbook. This is indeed a Good Thing, and something that will help advance IYA’s stated goals, although it isn’t clear exactly what IYA had to do with the FITsLiberator update.
Pamela mentioned the IYA’s Portal to the Universe project (without linking, for shame), and I got my hopes up, thinking that maybe someone had taken to heart the plea from my last post on the topic (I’ve edited it in a few places to bring it up to date):
As I write, I have spent 65 hours 135 hours preparing an EPO presentation for adults on the history of astronomy that gets presented at CCSO next week. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to give it at the Eagle River Nature Center sometime in the future - this is planned as a two-use program. There’s an outside chance it will get recycled in a few years and I’ll get a bit more mileage out of it.
The program starts with ancient conceptions of the structure of the universe and covers every really major astronomical discovery or theory since then. By “really major” I mean things as significant as heliocentrism, the cepheid period-luminosity relationship, the expansion of the universe, the cosmic microwave background, and the like. My presentation has 70 slides 95 slides, and all but two of them are images or animations. What has taken the most time has been (a) finding the illustrations and (b) getting the permissions to use them. (I know I can claim fair use - but sometimes I need permissions because the venue hosting the talk demands that I have them, regardless of the law; other times, I need permissions because it would be fair use to use the image in my talk, but not on the web or in the newspaper in promotion or coverage for the talk, etc, etc.)
What I really could use is a public domain or Creative Commons licensed image and animation library. Something that is captioned by experts so that I know exactly what I’m seeing in the image. For example, I don’t have a good animation of stellar parallax - there should be movies out there put together from FITS images that I can use. The movies exist, in varying quality, but getting permission to use a high quality, useful animation isn’t happening. There’s no animation that illustrates the origin of the cosmic background raditation that I can find. Even though I can picture how to illustrate it, I’m no artist. It is hard to find an illustration of the Keplerian thought transition from “orbs” to “orbits” - a fairly important advance in thinking about planets not as things affixed to spheres with rotate, carrying the planet along with it, but as things which are out in space attached to nothing and revolving in orbits.
Unfortunately, Portal to the Universe is not the image/animation library I had hoped. Portal to the Universe looks like it is going to be a super-cool, mega-feed-aggregator for everything good about astronomy. That’s great. I’m not against that. I just want more.
Pamela, IYA, please:
What I really could use is a public domain or Creative Commons licensed image and animation library, captioned by experts.
I’m not trying to be histrionic by using the big type. IYA obviously has some money to spend on improving astronomy outreach, and they’ve obviously got some political clout. Please start using that leverage to ask researchers to release significant images under Creative Commons or GPDL or some other free license.
I’m not alone. I’ve been associated with astronomy clubs for most of my life, and in each club, there are always five or ten people who are going out to talk to a school class or the Girl Scouts or similar groups once or twice a year - especially if they have kids of their own in the system. In the last five or ten years, as multimedia projectors have become common, the standards for presentations have risen sharply. As a consequence, these people are spending more time in PowerPoint or Keynote preparing their shows, and they are running up against the same problems I am. They ask: Should I just use the image and not tell anyone?
Usually you can do so, and do so legally. But what you can’t do is use it, and then (legally) give it to your pal in the astronomy club when he’s going to a different classroom to talk on the same subject. You can’t post the presentation file on the astronomy club website for everyone to use, for fear someone will object to the content. Even if we, personally, as individuals are willing to take the risk, people with fiduciary responsibility in the club (quite rightly) won’t allow it, due to that same risk.
IYA, if you can make a start of such a library, I, and people like me - and there are lots of us doing this independently in the trenches - will benefit by:
- Being able to share our presentation files without the fear of getting sued by some university bureaucrat protecting their “rights” to some image or other. I’m not saying it has happened, but I have heard stories about threats, and we’ve all heard about RIAA ruining peoples lives with lawsuits directed at the wrong defendant, demanding outrageous damages, etc. Give us a legitimate way to use the images and share presentations and dramatically cut the amount of preparation we have to do - that will advance what you are all about.
- Being able to do better education and outreach outside of our specialties. I have hundreds of thousands of images of asteroids taken with ground-based telescopes, because that is what I research - asteroids. I do not have even a single image of cosmic background radiation anisotropy that I know for sure I’m permitted to use. The good news? Since asteroids hit planets, and killed the dinosaurs, I’m often asked to talk about asteroids, not CMB anisotropy, so in those cases I have lots of cool images for those talks. The bad news? I’m also often asked to talk about the big bang, because that’s a pretty fundamental astronomical issue, and it is one that schoolteachers don’t always grasp enough to teach it well. (The captioning is important here - news release captioning is often mangled by institutional PR writers with no knowledge of the subject, and I often find that the information that goes with such images is a bit less helpful than it could be. I’m no cosmologist, but I’m not stupid either, and I’d benefit from an expert perspective on the kinds of issues we see streaming by in the feeds that basically just reproduce astronomy press releases. The proof of this are the large number of papers I get from arXiv when my interest has been spurred by a press release - I understand most of them.)
- One-stop shopping. I could probably cut my preparation time by more than half, because (a) I wouldn’t have to go google-surfing for images I can steal, and (b) I wouldn’t have to beg for permissions from dozens of different people, and keep track of when I’m getting referred to someone else for the permissions instead, when I’ve got permission, when I’ve been denied permission, etc. If I can cut prep time in half, I can (a) do three more EPO activities in the saved time, or (b) take some time off and not go crazy for doing so many EPO activities.
Institutions would benefit by preserving their copyright if they chose a creative commons - attrib - no derivative - no commercial license. (Oh, and by the way - I put my money where my mouth is. This blog is CC licensed. I’m also a magazine writer, and my writing has earned me some not insignificant money. If I can do it, I’m sure some astronomers can too.)
Thank you, IYA, for listening to my thoughts.
PS -
Last time I posted about IYA, people with the IYA asked me to call them on the telephone. Don’t take this personally, folks - but I am busy. I’m in the schools two or three times a week doing astronomy and physics education, and I’m not a teacher. I’m out in front of the general public six to eight times a year doing the same thing. I have a blog. I have a job. I’m in the inconvenient time zone of UT -9 (-8 for DST). And I tend to prefer my solitude anyway. But it isn’t that I don’t want to talk to you, its just that anytime I might call you I have five other things that are more important to do. If you want to talk to me, leave a comment and ask me to send my phone number - I’ll send it. It is easier to be interrupted than interrupt myself.
