Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2020

MARCH-APRIL 2020 whole, and now we have to adapt. How do we adapt when you can show Mars through a telescope and the audience only sees a “red dot”, while a mobile app shows much more detail, special effects and sounds? Very simply, two formulas work well for us in our activities. The first is to give a context to what the public sees: to tell mythological legends or curiosities that the apps do not contain to make people un- derstand that what they observe is not simply a “red dot.” The second is that, if you cannot rival technol- ogy, embrace it. We live in a time when it has never been easier to get photographs of planets or nebulae, where we can appreciate much more detail than we can with the naked eye. With so much material about astronomy circulating on the Internet (looking for “spectacular- ity” to get clicks), impressing a teenager seeing the Andromeda galaxy through an eyepiece takes effort. But surely, if we put a reflex camera (like the one he might have at home) in the eyepiece holder and if we show him a snapshot, we would undoubtedly hear a “wow.” And this is not so much for the spec- tacular image, but rather for the ap- parently simple and immediate nature of the in situ acquisition. These solutions cannot be imple- mented by many of those who seek to capitalize on astrotourism, pre- tending to “bottle astronomy” and do business with something that has never been commercialized, using very basic telescopes and showing the Moon and little else. Instead, they can be implemented by real amateur astronomers, who better understand all these factors, are able to communicate to the new generations how exciting this pas- sion can be, and have learned how to do it even better by riding the wave of technology. !