National Astronomy Week 2025, 1-9 Feb – request for broadcasters

The National Astronomy Week (NAW) committee is seeking to organise livestreaming from telescopes via Zoom, available to the general public, on the evenings on 1-9 February 2025.

This was done successfully for the 2020 NAW ‘Mars Encounter’ (for the recordings of these sessions, see https://www.youtube.com/@NationalAstronomyWeek, in particular, the latter parts of the live broadcasts).

What we need is a roster of people spread around the country (to maximise the chance of some of them having clear weather), committed to being available on one or more of the evenings 1-9 February. They need to be equipped with telescopes, cameras that produce an image stream that can be broadcast, computers with Zoom, and a good Internet connection, and they need to be competent at the technicalities of sharing the live image in a Zoom broadcast (though some training will be given and there will be practice sessions in advance to test systems in advance of the public broadcasts).

We are also looking for potential ‘hosts’ or anchor-people for each session who would not livestream observations but be on their computers indoors and able to chat and interact with the people who are livestreaming from telescopes. The requirement for these hosts is mostly that they are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the things being shown in the broadcast and are competent at operating the Zoom platform.

If you would like to be involved in this, please let me know and I will add you to the list.

For more info about NAW, see astronomyweek.org.uk.

Best,

David Arditti
Director, Equipment & Techniques Section, and Vice-President, BAA