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Local Outreach with the UCLA Planetarium
  • +6
  • Briley Lewis,
  • Ronald Lopez,
  • Abhimat Gautam,
  • Pauline Arriaga,
  • Jesus Salas,
  • Peter Williams,
  • Mason MacDougall,
  • Aidan Gibbs,
  • Rory Bentley
Briley Lewis
UCLA

Corresponding Author:blewis@astro.ucla.edu

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Ronald Lopez
UCLA
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Abhimat Gautam
UCLA
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Pauline Arriaga
UCLA
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Jesus Salas
UCLA
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Peter Williams
UCLA
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Mason MacDougall
UCLA
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Aidan Gibbs
UCLA
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Rory Bentley
UCLA
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Abstract

The UCLA Planetarium hosts star shows and lectures on various astronomy topics, educating UCLA and the broader Los Angeles community about science and the wonders of the night sky. It serves over 4000 people per year, as UCLA Astronomy’s largest outreach effort. We host private shows for visiting school groups (30% of our attendees), shows for UCLA astronomy courses (20%), and weekly public shows for the community at large (50%). Our planetarium and its events are run exclusively by graduate students, who also maintain its historic projectors and dome. In the near future, we plan to improve and expand our outreach efforts in two specific ways. Our outreach efforts are free for educational groups, but we currently do not provide travel support for visiting schools. We plan to actively reach out to school groups from underserved communities and hope to raise funds to cover these schools’ field trip and travel expenses. We also plan to improve our science communication effectiveness, with strategies for improving volunteer recruitment, training volunteers on effective public speaking skills, and improving the quality of our existing repository of presentations. Of course, these in person events are on hold due to the ongoing pandemic; in the meantime, we are developing ways to serve our audience virtually. We recently hosted our first “virtual” planetarium show on YouTube Live, with over 1,700 viewers on the livestream and over 7,300 total viewers. We welcome any suggestions or ideas to help us improve our planetarium outreach efforts!