Last night we had the pleasure of organizing a teacher training activity about the Global Citizen Science program «Globe at night» at the National Observatory in Penteli mountain. For this project we collaborated with the Directorates of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd school districts of Athens and Western Attica. What is more, the activity was devoted to celebrating World Environment Day (held every year on June 5th). A total of 100 primary and secondary school teachers participated in this exciting 4 hour seminar.

Apart from offering lectures about the history and research in Astronomy in Greece, the economic cost of Climate Change was on the spotlight and it sparked a lot of interesting discussions. We  also gave participants the opportunity to use the educational material from Globe at Night, a global citizen science program that aims at raising public awareness about light pollution, supervised by the American Organizations National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Association of Universities for research in Astronomy and funded by the National Science Foundation. The local partner in Greece is the National Observatory in Athens.

So we looked at the night sky in search of Bootes, this month’s featured constellation that will be visible for almost 10 more days, by locating its brightest star Arcturus. Then we estimated light pollution by comparing our view of Bootes with magnitude charts provided by the program and submitted our observations using our mobile phones devices or tablets.

The highlight of the night was our chance to observe Jupiter with Newall Telescope (donated to Greece by the University of Cambridge) standing on the «largest elevator» in the city of Athens that adjusts to the position of the telescope!

Here are some pictures of last night’s seminar: