Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2020

23 MARCH-APRIL 2020 OUR EXPERIENCES for ourselves at the begin- ning of our journey was to raise awareness of and the fight against the light pol- lution that was already starting to threaten our sky. It was the dawn of 2000 and an unprecedented waste of energy accompa- nied economic develop- ment across the country. We have begun to catalog the light sources in our mu- nicipality and province, and the first steps have been taken to increase aware- ness of our light pollution problem. Eventually, our as- sociation and other realities usually includes an informational seminar on constellation recogni- tion, meteoric observation, and me- teor video recording. We have the privilege of having counted more than 200 participants from all over Spain in some editions. One of the most intense significant moments of for our popularization task effort was in 2009 for the Inter- national Year of Astronomy, in 2009, held 400 years after the first tele- scopic astronomical observations by Galileo Galilei. As members of the Organizing Committee, we have par- ticipated in various meetings and joined a multitude of activities that have highlighted the importance of astronomy in all areas of our society: Astronomy in the streets, The 100 hours of astronomy, The stellar par- ties, etc. Another activity that has attracted more attention in recent years was the launch in 2016 of a probe bal- loon into the Earth’s stratosphere thanks to a dissemination project fi- nanced by the Diputación de Jaén. We had built an effortless, simple probe, with containing two image C hildren's work- shop for the construction of a celestial plani- sphere. V Jornadas de Turismo de la Ciudad de Martos, September 2019. recording systems (one lateral and one vertical) and a GPS for tracking. The total weight of the system had been calculated in detail, as well as the quantity of he- lium to be intro- duced into the 2-meter diameter balloon. It man- aged to reach an altitude of reach 34,000 kilometers of altitude, taking beautiful images of our Earth. One of the most ambitious objectives we set D elivery of the 2008 An- dalusian Flag award.