Night of the Stars (Noche de las Estrellas)
Chapter Interdisciplinary Optics
In August 12th, hundreds of people from our city joined the biggest astronomy event in the region, Night of the Stars - Pereira. The OSA Student Chapter of Chapter Interdisciplinary Optics participated in the LOC team and in various activities to expose the general public to science.
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Night of the Stars is an annual astronomy festival developed on our campus by the Observatory and Planetarium, with the support and participation of several institutions from the area, enterprises and our host University. Unlike other science-related events in the city it is directed to a wider population than only students (high-school, elementary or college). This event is geared towards families, children, teenagers, and adults without link to the University attend to learn and experience science outside the classroom. Attendees were invited to activities with hands on experiences, where they had to interact and learn from the experiment, or build up their own water propelled rocket from recycled materials. Some other activities were planetarium functions, stars and black hole exhibition, talks, observation through telescopes, physics and optics experiments hall, robotics workshop. Our chapter helped fund the event and participated with the Optics Tool Kit and some built experiments of our own. We also received the SPIE speaker, Ph.D. Jonathan Arenberg, from the James Webb Space Telescope Project, who engaged the public with his first talk in Spanish. The 300 attendees got to know about this great project to be released next year, with high end optics and engineering technology that will let us see deeper into the space. The event received over 2000 visitors from all ages, both children and adults enjoyed a day full of science. We would like to thank OSA and the Centennial Special Events Grant for the opportunity to participate in this annual event.
