 Thank you for joining us. This is great. We don't normally, at least my group, doesn't do these kind of joint webinars, so it's really great to see a lot of familiar librarian faces in the list, but also people, I have no idea who you are, so I'm glad that we're all going to be great friends now. So this webinar is NASA Partnerships in Your Own Backyard, so this is a joint presentation from the Space Science Institute's NASA at My Library program, the Night Sky Network and the Solar System Ambassadors. Your presenters today are myself, Annie Holland. I'm the Community Engagement Manager at the Space Science Institute's National Center for Interactive Learning. Vivian White is here from the Night Sky Network. Don Finkin is here. He is a Night Sky Network volunteer. Heather Doyle and Kay Ferrari from Solar System Ambassadors. And also Katherine Old, who is a Solar System Ambassador and she's at the Northwest Arkansas Community College. I also saw in the chat a couple of my co-workers are here. I'm happy to answer questions if those of us presenting aren't getting to them. That's Kelly and Lakante and also Greg Moss Hammer. They're both here in Boulder with me at SSI. So like Vivian said, if you have any questions, there is that Q&A box, which will be very helpful for us. We'll just answer those at the end. If you're having immediate problems with your technology or, you know, I look funny, go ahead and put that in the chat box and we can fix that right away. Oops, have to hit the right button to advance my slide. So just really quickly, our agenda for today. So again, hi, I'm Annie. I'm just doing a brief introduction and we also will have a survey on the next slide, Vivian Standretti, asking who you guys are so that we know who participated in this webinar. I want to give a quick overview of the StarNet program and why those of you who aren't librarians should care about libraries. Again, I'll try to keep that quick so we have more time for Q&A. K. Ferrari is going to give an overview of the Solar System Ambassadors and Catherine is going to talk about some of her success stories with partnering with libraries. Vivian will give the overview of the Night Sky Network and then Don will give some of his successes working with libraries. Don, I'm very excited to hear about some of those. And then again, we'll have some Q&A at the end. So quick poll, Vivian, now is your chance. We just want to know those people who are on the webinar right now, which of these communities you represent. So we'll give you a quick second to fill that out. Once everyone's introduced themselves, oh, hello, Jennifer, one of our longtime library partners. Just chatted. Once you guys are done filling that out, I was also hoping that you could put in the chat so that we can go back and see the existing partnerships. If you're already partnering with the opposite network here. So if you're a librarian, do you already have a partnership with Night Sky Network or Solar System Ambassadors and vice versa? If you're part of one of these NASA volunteer networks, are you already working with libraries? Feel free to just say yes or give us a description, maybe a link to a flyer. We're all just kind of trying to figure out how much these partnerships are already happening so that we can do a better job of facilitating them for you. And I guess Vivian, whenever the... Oh, perfect. All right. Oh, that's a wonderful mix. So it looks like about a quarter of the audience is Solar System Ambassadors. About 6% is Night Sky Network. That sounds about right. And then almost 70% of you are library folks. So that is just wonderful. Oh, I'm just seeing all kinds of friends popping up. Hello, Beth from the Colorado State Library just joined us. I'm glad to see you're on here. So I'm going to go ahead and close that. Perfect. That did what I thought it would. And again, if you've got existing partnerships, please do tell us about them down there in that chat so that maybe we can harass you to get more info later. So really quickly, I wanted to tell those of you who aren't library folks a little bit about the Star Library Education Network. So this is our program here at the Space Science Institute that is working to provide professional development, exhibit and kit experience, just all kinds of STEM support to public libraries around the country. This program was started about eight years ago with a grant from the National Science Foundation. We're now into phase two of that particular grant. And we've also received funding from NASA as well as the Institute Museum and Library Services and the National Institutes of Health. So this is a very popular program, and it's grown quite a bit since its original inception. Some of our project partners are listed down on the bottom of the slides there if you can see it. So American Library Association, Cornerstones of Science, Pacific Science Center, Education Development Center, High Ginger I saw you were on, as well as Lunar and Planetary Institute, among many others. So a little bit about what the Starnet Model is. I know those of you who have a passing familiarity know that we do exhibits and maybe that's all that you are aware of. So we definitely do build interactive STEM exhibits and STEM kits for public libraries. These range in size from a little box of Eclipse stuff all the way up to an 800 square foot exhibit about NASA that has a model cupola in it. So all kinds of really cool stuff, museum quality. That's certainly kind of the big shiny piece, but what's really important is the professional development and the community building. So Kellyan, who I believe is still there in the chat, develops all kinds of hands-on activities for these programs. You see various websites on here showing you how to get to those. We also do in-person and webinar training for library staff to get them more comfortable, not just necessarily with the scientific content, right? It's not, let me tell you about Mars. It's, let me tell you how to help the kids learn themselves more about Mars, which I think is really important, the facilitation as opposed to the content knowledge building. We also have an online community of practice. That's just our website where we provide all of the info for librarians about how to conduct their programs. We provide the links to our PDE items, as well as tough places where they can interact. And not just with librarians either. There are quite a few, I know, Solar System Ambassadors, but also other NASA subject matter experts who participate in that community, which is great. And then also, obviously, we have a very robust, because of our federal funding, research and evaluation program. So we're constantly growing, we're constantly building, and I think this is a really good time for Solar System Ambassadors and Night Sky Network. Those of you who haven't already been partnering with libraries, we've got a really good hold in the library community right now, and they're really eager to be getting these kinds of interventions. So this is my brag slide. So these are our StarNet programs. So the slide over there on the right is all the places that have hosted large exhibit programs. As you might suspect, it's limited how many libraries can actually do those sort of programs, because it does require quite a bit of space. And when you are a small bookmobile in Alabama that is parked in a school parking lot, you can't host an exhibit. So we've been able to start expanding what we're providing for the libraries, also aside from professional development, obviously, by also providing smaller things like kits. So our NASA at my library program went to 75 libraries across the country, 78 with our pilot sites, allowing them to get really high quality NASA content, things from Wavelength, things we developed. And they'll be our partners for four years. And then we also had a smaller kit program around, we'll currently have a small kit program around the August Eclipse. So that's this slide over here on the left. All of those green dots represent public libraries that have committed to hosting Eclipse programming in that August timeframe, and they received a kit from us with glasses and things. But the main reason I wanted to point that out is when I went and looked through the applications, there were a little over 200 confirmed Solar System Ambassador and Night Sky Network collaborations listed in those proposals. So those were people who hadn't even got the stuff from me yet, and they were already super excited to partner. So congratulations, libraries, and thank you, NASA volunteer people for helping with all of that. I think that's just my quick overview, because like I said, I wanted to give everyone else a little more time, and then we can ask questions at the end. So if you have any questions about StarNet or about any of those programs I just listed again, if you could stick those in the Q&A, that will be the easiest for us to be able to go and grab those questions at the end. Oops, I am such a terrible liar. I did have one more important slide. I must have put this out of order. So sorry, Kate, I will be ready for you in just one moment after I go through this slide. It's really weird. I thought I had a different order. So for those of you who are not librarians, this is the important info, right? This is why you can feel confident that when you're going and working with libraries, it's something you really should be doing. The big thing, libraries are in nearly every community, and they're free. Not many places can say that. Approximately 70% of the US population utilizes their local public library. Billion visits a year. Take a look at the infographic on the right to see a better breakdown of those visits. 17,000 public libraries. So this includes the large main libraries, branch libraries, bookmobiles, all of that. And the one that I just think is spectacular and the reason that we should continue these partnerships is that library patron demographics are on average a direct match to census demographics in their county. They get the type of patronage that other informal, informal education venues would be very jealous of and the libraries have that just kind of built in. So if you're not already partnering, some of the very good reasons why. So now what I said is true. If you have any questions about our programs or libraries are at large up in the Q&A would be perfect. And I am going to pass the mic on over to Kay, who's going to tell us a little bit more about the Solar System Ambassadors program. These slides. Okay, I've got the slides up so you can just tell me when to switch. Okay, that's fine. Okay, so we'll move off this one and we'll move on to the next slide. By the way, it's a pleasure to be here talking with librarians again. I gave a presentation a little over a year ago to start at librarians. And we have had a tremendous result with the more library programs showing up in our event report form. Solar System Ambassadors have been around for 20 years. We're celebrating our 20th anniversary in a couple of weeks. So we're all getting ready for a big party. We'll move on in. Next slide. So who are we? There are 700 and about 730 space enthusiasts volunteers who are Solar System Ambassadors. They're from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, US Virgin Islands, and some US citizens who are living abroad. Next slide, please. So what did they do? They engage in public engagement programs in a variety of venues. For last year, last calendar year, they conducted more than 2000 events with almost more than half a million direct audience participants and indirectly reached 28 million more readers, viewers or listeners. In fact, I noticed I looked over the participant list and we have one of our ambassadors who's on the line who writes a column and she'll see her column listed there, the upper right hand one called our space Orion is far out. She's been doing this for 13 years. Every every two weeks, she writes another article for her community, and she really knows how to communicate and speak with her community. So we don't limit this to certain things. We allow the ambassadors to find what works for them, and engage in that that outreach. And libraries are a prime source for us. And some of our volunteers specialize and we'll go on to the next slide. We have some about 97 93 rather, who are Solar System Ambassador master teachers. And their specialty is to conduct workshops for other teachers or for informal educators. So if you're at a library and you'd like to have someone come out and train your staff on NASA STEM educational products that they could use in their events, contact one of the master teachers. You'll know a master teacher. If you go to a bio page, you'll see the term underneath the biography Solar System Ambassador master teacher. We are going to be working on a way so that you will be able to pull out a list of ambassadors, who are the master teachers, so you don't have to hunt to find them, or you can contact us and we'll help you. Next slide, please. So we train using a more conservative method than a webinar, we have telecons with downloadable website materials. We have more than 400 archived telecons and are on our NASA nationwide website. The reason we have an independent website is because we are now inviting other NASA networks to join us for our telecons. And a lot of NASA staff as well, NASA speakers Bureau and others will join us. In fact, I sent out three notices today for upcoming telecons for June. And Anne will be passing those along to you and you're most welcome to join us. One of the benefits of joining us for telecons, even though you will invite somebody out to give a talk, is you know what they've been trained on, you know the materials that they have, that we have, and you can be selective in what what programs you want to put on. We collaborate with the NASA Museum Alliance to host these these professional development telecons. And that has been a great benefit to both of us. And I know Amelia Chapman is on the line. And if she can answer any questions about the NASA Museum Alliance that you may have. Next slide please. So how can we serve your library? Well, we ambassadors will often host NASA milestone events. Pluto Flyby is one that was really big a couple years ago. And upcoming on September 15 will be the Cassini mission and at Saturn. So that's another big NASA event that you might consider as a library hosting an event like that for the public, or host end of mission to reminisce over the accomplishments of that mission. NASA presentations for speakers, we can help with summer reading programs and have done that in the past, lead hands on activities for science days or summer camps, celestial viewing opportunities. There's one big one that's coming up as you all know, the total solar eclipse in 2017, in August, and the evening star parties. There's another NASA event that will be coming up later this year, International Observe the Moon night. And anything that you might suggest that you would want for your library. Next slide please. A few years ago, I was asked to come up with a slide that would exemplify what the Solar System Ambassadors program was all about. So I found looking through my pictures, once that I had taken and I found a picture I'd taken in 2005, at an event at the Ufer-Hausi Center in Virginia. And it reminded me so much of what one of our former ambassadors who has left us used to say, she was a Roman Catholic nun, Sister Clarice Lola, and she used to say, if what I do makes the difference in the life of just one child, then it was worth doing. And that's kind of the overarching feeling that I've gotten working with ambassadors. They want to make a difference in the lives of others. So I thought that was this was perfect. Well, recently, I've been able to get an update on the two people who are pictured here. Next slide. In fact, I got my slides in late, because Jean and Danielle, yes, that's the little girl, were visiting JPL last Friday. And I took a picture of them in Mission Control, along with a picture of the slides that I use for my presentation. What's happening with Danielle now, she just graduated from high school. She has almost a full scholarship to Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, and she's going to major in engineering. And she's already looking into NASA internship. This is what I feel exemplifies what Solar System ambassadors are all about. And it's been a privilege and a pleasure to work with them. And I know I'm going to enjoy working with all of you. Heather Doyle, Rachel Zimmerman-Brockman, and I are the Solar System Ambassadors team. If you need anything, contact any one of us and we'll help you out. Thank you very much for this opportunity. I'll turn it back to you. That's my last slide. Thank you so much, Kate. That was amazing. I hadn't seen that slide. So I believe Catherine is our next presenter. So Catherine, you can go ahead and start sharing your screen. I will stop sharing mine. Hopefully you guys are looking at a screen that says that I'm learning the ropes. Yes. When I started as a Solar System ambassador four years ago, I had no idea how to set up a public event. So I went to my library and asked to talk to any librarian that had an interest in space. And they introduced me to Sue Ann Peekle, who's pictured in the bottom picture there with me, introducing me at one of the first events that I did. She's the children's librarian and I did four events that year. And all of those were events with children. And then the next year, sort of expanded, I started working with teens and the Home School Association group. Because of that relationship, I ended up being asked to work with the Civil Air Patrol and two other libraries. And so, you know, one library and talks to another library. And this is something that I've learned through this process. And then we ended up with several star parties. The first one was for the Bella Vista Library. And I just about three weeks ago held a second star party for the Bella Vista Library. And I've now committed to co hosting one or two star parties with them every year. And so we have on the left a star party that we did during the day looking at the sun. And so that was really great. Lots of the people had never looked at the sun before. And they were so surprised that you could point a telescope at the sun and look at it and not go blind. That was lots of fun. And then down on the bottom, on the right, obviously, another star party in the evening. And so we've had lots of these star parties now. And then last year, the Bentonville Public Library asked if I would be able would be willing to partner with them for a grant for a library exhibit called explore space a cosmic journey. And I have to admit, I had never thought of a library as having an exhibit. But it sounded like a ton of fun and a great opportunity for our community. So I said, Sure, what do I have to do? And so the grant required that they have quite a few specific talks on different topics. And so I committed to five presentations during those two months, which meant that January, February and March of this year for me was crazy busy. But it was so much fun. We did the public opening and you're looking at pictures here of the public opening. 275 people attended that event. We also had an educators workshop. And I had a ton of fun with that one. The library staff brainstormed ideas and then they would call me and say, we want to do this. And how's the science on that? And I would say, Oh, that's great. Oh, and did you think about this? Oh, and let's add this one in. And so we had a lot of fun talking back and forth. I got to interact with the library staff a lot more than I have before, because of that. And then, you know, another image, I thought these slides were in a different order. This should have been one before. But anyway, 275 people that opening day. And you can see that that room, which is fairly large was packed. And so the public opening. Then we had four other lectures that I was the speaker and a bunch of other ones that other they had other people in. They also partnered with Crystal Bridges, which is a large art museum around here. And they partnered with a Native American Museum and a couple of other things. At this one, we were talking about the Earth and Mars, and we were talking about robots. And so the Amazium brought in these Azobot robots that you're looking at in the bottom right well both of these pictures are the Azobots. And they're so much fun, because they're little bitty tiny robots that read the pictures, or the color of that line, they'll follow the line. And so you can code with color. And you can, you know, red, blue, green and all within one inch tells him to drive faster. And so the little robot will drive faster. And there's codes that'll make him wiggle. And the kids had a blast with that. And it was so much fun. I did another one on Asteroid's Comets and Meteors. And one of the other partners brought in a piece of one of the comets that landed in Oh, goodness, where did he say that comment landed? Oh, it landed in the USSR back when it was the USSR. And he had a big chunk of it that was like eight or 10 inches across. And he brought that in and let all of us touch it, which was cool to be able to touch something that was an outer space. And then I spoke again on the electric and magnetic changes in space. And we had, you know, the Vandegraaff and being able to actually see how those changes in space relate to changes on earth and how it works. Total attendance for this entire exhibit over the two months that it was at the library was over 7700 people. So it was huge and lots of people attended. And then because of that, and another organization that I'm part of supporting STEM in space, it's a local nonprofit that's donating telescopes to libraries. Part of the star net is where we get the telescopes. But supporting STEM in space has donated eight telescopes to seven libraries. And so you're looking at me with a bunch of librarians that we've given that the telescopes to, and they are having a lot of fun. The Bentonville Library had so many people that were on the waiting list to get the telescope that they actually raised the money through the fund through the donation through the foundation to buy a second telescope because they now have 23 people on the waiting list. Each person only gets the telescope for a week, but that's still more than half a year of a wait list trying to wait for the telescopes. And so that's sort of a side shoot partnership that we've got going. And we help maintain those telescopes for the libraries. And because of those telescopes in the libraries, I've now been asked as a solar system ambassador to come in and co host star parties for five more libraries. I also was asked to help write supporting letters to a bunch of libraries for the NASA at my library and actually one of our libraries, one of the libraries that I wrote a letter for is one of the ones that got a grant so I will be over in Eureka Springs doing stuff with their backpacks and I'm so excited about that. But my message for everybody today, especially for the solar system ambassadors is, you know, what do you do in order to maintain these partnerships with the libraries? And the best thing I can tell you is keep up with the webinars. I teach at a community college. And so I almost never attend these webinars. I actually have someone sitting with my class right now take because the students are taking a test so that I can be here with you. But I go back in this evening or tomorrow or something and go through the slides on the webinars because there's so much amazing information. And as a solar system ambassador, find one of these topics that you're really passionate about. Mine is the engineering on spacecraft. I love talking about how we design spacecraft to go and do all of the fascinating things that we do. And then allow the librarians to lead you. They know their community. They know what the community is interested in and which groups in that community are going to show up and talk to you, whether it's the youth or the teenagers, they're going to be able to lead you on pointing you in the right direction to fulfill those commitments that you're trying to make. And so I want to thank you for listening to me talk. And then I'm going to turn it back over to you. That was great. Thank you. I didn't quite realize how many of our partner libraries you were already involved with. That's fantastic. Yeah, lots. All of them. Well, no, but I'm having a lot of fun. Awesome. Vivian, I believe you are up next. Hey, I think so. Let me see if I can share my screen here. Right. Everybody, hopefully you're seeing my screen. No. Perhaps. Yes, we can see it. There we go. And maybe even the presentation. Excellent. All right. Hi, everybody. I'm Vivian White. I'm here talking to you from San Francisco, California at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. And I run the NASA Night Sky Network. And I'll tell you all about it and how you can partner with this. The Night Sky Network is a group of over 450 amateur astronomy clubs. Have any of you ever worked with amateur astronomers in your area? I can see the chat still. No, can't see the chat. Somebody might have to tell me if anyone's chiming in. Well, these amateur astronomers are incredibly passionate about the Night Sky and about sharing that with their communities. They will cook up a comment for you. I have to say this is one of the largest comments I've ever seen. But if you haven't ever had a comment hooked up for you in your library, it's not as messy as it looks. But it is really exciting. They bring telescopes. This is a big thing that amateur astronomy clubs are able to do. Many of them have dozens of members with telescopes who will bring telescopes out daytime and nighttime. Somebody asked earlier in the chat about how do you observe the sun? But the telescope and it is it is a truly amazing thing, although we're at solar minimum. So I've been observing the sun a lot lately and not a whole lot going on. But sometimes you'll see lots of sunspots. Some of the amateurs have telescopes that show prominences and you can see quite a lot of action on this sun. But also, of course, daytime or nighttime is when often you will find amateur astronomers at their telescopes. So they are ready and willing to partner with you come to your library for events. They do public programming all the time. And I will show you how to find them. So just a little bit of background night sky network dot org will get you to us. And we have been around for about a dozen years now. Working with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific NASA launched this in order to get NASA making NASA science real for the public under the night sky getting the NASA information to amateur astronomers getting the NASA science out. So we so you just are our exciting brag bit, we have more than 450 clubs. And they're all over the country. And if you happen to live not near an amateur astronomy club, but somewhere very rural, you are in luck because amateur astronomers love almost nothing more than dark skies. So it's not a problem if you are far away from one of these out somewhere in to the west in South Dakota or Wyoming. These places are very dark. And so even if you're somewhere not really near an amateur astronomy club, if you are near a dark sky, they get there, you'll have good luck getting them to come and visit you anyway. As far as how to find them, it's very easy. The red arrows here, when you go to night sky network dot org on the right, it will tell you usually your current location. And if not, you can put a zip code in or anything you'd like. That will get you all of the clubs and events in your area, the clubs, many clubs list their upcoming events on the calendar. So you can see even what they're already doing. Once you find a club in your area, there's also this request an event button. And this is super easy, because it will ask you all of the questions that they would ask you when you go back and forth in an email. It will say how many people are you hoping to have? When would you like this? Do you have a backup date? If it's cloudy, those kind of things. So this request an event tab is really interesting and easy to use. And I just wanted to give libraries, since we have mostly libraries here, a little bit of a heads up about working with amateur astronomy clubs. They are all volunteers. So amateur astronomy clubs are simply enthusiasts who have day jobs as partners and doctors and or they've been retired. But they're not doing this for profit only for the love of astronomy. So they meet usually about once a month. So it's good to plan ahead. If you have an event you'd like to do, sometimes it can take a month for them to get a whole bunch of people on board to do that. If you go to this link at the bottom here, bit.ly slash partner NSN. That gets you to an article with some things to consider when you're thinking of partnering with amateur astronomers, like make sure to turn off your sprinklers if it's a nighttime event and turn the bright lights off so that you can actually see stuff that's in the sky. And I really recommend if you haven't done so already, go ahead and go to one of the star parties or the club meetings or the lectures that they have with the club. I think it's it'll give you a chance to meet the people who are in the club and it will also kind of give you an idea of what they're available to do. And often they have really fun events with lots of telescopes where you can see things in darker skies than you might in your public library if you're in the middle of a city. One thing is I would recommend entirely like I said they're volunteers. I just wanted to mention this. It's very important to feed and water them as we all know as volunteers with many things. You don't they come out for free. Most clubs don't charge anything. Maybe if it's a long way throwing some gas money their way or something like that. But things to think about is if this is done anywhere where it's going to be cold. It's really nice to have a place where they can come in and take breaks. Things like that. And just follow up. Thank you. These amateurs are doing this because they love astronomy and they love the ooze and the ahs that they get when the kids look through the telescopes or the adults look through the telescope. So really their payback for them is the enthusiasm of the audience. But thank you. Also goes a really long way. I wanted to give you just a couple of other resources that you can find. Excuse me on the night sky network page. We do have outreach resources. These are informal outreach activities that you could many of them are easy to do with very simple materials. So you can find for example our solar eclipse 2017 resources. This gives PowerPoints and and simple things that you can print and talk about even handouts and such that you can access if people are interested in finding out more about astronomy. And also on there are archives of a lot of webinars just like this one on NASA science topics. So if you have questions about that we have lots of their events that are happening right you know at the time in the sky. So we have a recent Kansini one. We have some about Pluto. We have lots of different background webinars with actual NASA scientists and those are quite useful. And then maybe one of our most used resources is this night sky planner. And that gives you all the information you need to know what's up in the sky tonight or this week. Tells you the sunset and the moon phases and what meteor showers are coming up and interesting things to look at in the sky. So it's an easy one to access. And last but not least I just want to point out they get the widget that we do have a widget that allows people to find their local clubs and and events. So if you want to as you know curators of resources clubs are a great resource that a place you can point people. So this is a very easy thing. You can just add this to any web page if people are interested. If you have a space or a stem web page. It's a really easy resource to add to that. And with that I just want to say you're welcome to contact me if you have any questions I am happy to answer them or hook you up with your local astronomy club. Although it's very easy to find there on the web page. We are on Facebook and Twitter and I am so happy our amateur astronomers work with hundreds of libraries across the country. So I know there's already a lot of work being done. And the more the merrier they always I love to have requests from the public and from the library. So with that I wanted to introduce a really special amateur astronomer. I will say that astronomy clubs don't always identify as night sky network clubs. Each astronomy club is its own individual organization. And today Don Ficken is joining us from the St. Louis Astronomical, St. Louis Astronomy Club. And he has done some really amazing work with libraries. So I wanted to invite him to talk a little bit about that. And I'm going to stop sharing. Don are you able to share your screen? Actually I didn't bring mine up. Yeah you can just do that. I'd be happy to, oops hold on one second that was mine again. And while they're doing that I did get a couple questions in the chat about people not being able to access the chat while we're sharing our screen. If you minimize your videos and then open that window then you can have them both open. So just close one to open the other. All right let's see if I can get Don's on here. Yeah. Is that working done? Okay I can't see you have to say next screen. There you go that's fine. Great. Oh yeah so we are in St. Louis we love the Night Sky Network. We've been a very heavy user of that. I think one of the early adopters of the system and it's really been critical for us. We do a lot of events. When I started our library telescope program and our club started it in 2014 I think we did maybe 70 a year. Right now that's it's well over 150 years. So it's been a really big factor for us. Our club St. Louis Astronomical Society is about 160 members now. We've been around you can see from the logo since 1936. We're pretty heavy in outreach and so when we came across this program and you go and switch the next slide. We found that this great program where the New Hampshire Astronomical Society had launched in 2008. They already had some other cities participating. I think at that point they had maybe a hundred or so telescopes already. What we really liked about it it was something that where you can simply as a patron check out library or telescope out just like a book for seven days. It leveraged existing library systems. They stored it. They checked it out. They administered all that. We thought that was great. We looked at the power and how easy it was to use and how portable it was. That was terrific. And we also liked the fact that the library took the responsibility for the telescope so we didn't have to worry about the liabilities and all that type of thing. Go ahead and switch the next slide. So what is interesting is that we had a lot of discussion in our club about when we started talking about this. Well the first there was a naysayer as well. He was this is a really small telescope. You're going to be using this around libraries. Nobody will ever really want to use this. Who's going to want to just look at the planets and the moon or you know bright star. They want to go out of the dark. Their thought was to go out to a branch manager and see if they can convince them to use it. We pretty much I hate to say this had kind of forget all that stuff. We went straight to the top directors in St. Louis of the libraries. We found a champion very quickly and within the first launch we did this at launch in 2014 we started out with 18 telescopes. Our members were astonished that our libraries in the St. Louis area would go that fast into this program. And you know how libraries are very competitive. Pretty soon one library talked to another library and another library had to get into it. And next year we increased that number to 57. And in the next year we moved it up to 131. You can see the picture of my wife. Actually this is just one shipment of library telescopes coming to our house. My house. Looking through my garage. And it was it was incredible. Actually we actually had one situation where we had two UPS trucks delivering telescopes to my house. That was incredible. We can go ahead and switch the next slide. So one of the questions I almost always get is who pays for all this stuff? Well it turned out that libraries are really not opposed to spending a little bit of money. We typically would seed the library with the telescope if we could find one. We typically would maybe do three or four telescopes a year. They would cost, we would tell the library look if you like more. We can get those for 325 bucks. Basically we did a lot of stuff that would take a standard telescope. We did a lot of add-ons to make that go up at that price. That was pretty much our cost. And we found the libraries were not opposed at all. In fact one library I had a doctor that was a friend of the library and he says here's my credit card. You want to buy more telescopes go buy them and just put on my credit card. And I think probably the challenge was in some of the smaller libraries. They went out and they did fundraisers and you know they sold books for money and whatever else. They would get a little bit here a little bit there and pretty soon they were on board. But about I'd say about three-quarters of it came actually funded through the libraries and the rest of it came through private donors and the clubs. There's actually several clubs in St. Louis that have got into the program where the clubs would donate just a little bit to the funding of the telescopes. What has really fueled us though is that the other day is that there was a seed thing where we got started. That was fun right? But there was a lot of reluctance by the libraries. You know I'm not sure exactly how this equipment is going to hold up. It turned out we had very few problems. When they started realizing that the programs we had some programs where we would have 98 people show up in a library and the waiting lists were incredible. We were getting one case I know that I think Katherine was talking about this before. We had one case where we had one telescope with 90 almost 100 people in the waiting list. So if you figure a seven-day checkout whether maybe a day or two turnaround we were getting a year and a half to two years waiting lists was crazy. But I think a lot of the factor for the libraries themselves is that they're trying to get away from the idea that there's stingy old book places that you know you have to be quiet all the time they want to be more innovative and the innovation was a big factor. Once they got passed that the equipment actually worked pretty good because out of 131 telescopes in a basically about two and a half years now we've almost had no problems with this particular design. We spent about six hours to upgrade the telescope to make sure that we don't have problems with it. We use a standard design for everybody so we can fix problems the design problem but that's been really important. But the libraries with all that said what they really get excited about is about the patrons. Patrons love this. They love looking at the moon. Most have never seen the moon through a telescope. They've never seen Saturn's rings. They've never seen the moons of Jupiter. They find there's amazing views. We have stories where they went to Mexico checked out the telescope went to New Mexico and told us about all the wonderful things they could see and of course the waiting list is really the indicator at the end of the day that this program is really working. We had one library tell us this you know this there's really we can't say anything bad about this. In fact they were calling our amateur astronomers which is actually a fun thing rock stars of space or astronomy they're saying this is the coolest program ever. When you get that kind of enthusiasm you get a lot of excitement within a club. Okay Vivian? Very important part of this is that the New Hampshire did a pretty good job of designing the program as far as the actual mechanics the telescope but what we did is we added a very important factor on it. We designed a 90-minute program that includes 45 minutes inside where we could see on the left-hand picture where one of the guys basically has taken them through the parts of a telescope where to look what to do how to pick it up safely whatever else and what that does is it builds the confidence of the patrons that they can actually use this thing before we even go outside which is the second part they are comfortable that they can find a exit sign focus properly pick it up and you can just see the lights coming on their in their in their eyes whenever they're saying this is not very hard at all. The second part is the outside program of course this is a little bit of a daylight view here but we would want to go outside and say now that you've learned how to use this we're going to show you actually how to find something and we start talking about how to navigate the nice sky where north is and how the planet is the eucliptic and all that type of thing and we very quickly they realize wow I know how to operate this I've actually used that and that's terrific and one element that's been kind of important our libraries don't like to create programs put them on the books and then cancel them because of cloudy skies so we what we do is we always hold this rain or shine if it turns out as cloudy I set outside we still hold the program all we do is we talk more about nice sky navigation inside we find that they're very fascinated by that they have lots of questions and of course when we do the outside program when it works we bring our big telescopes and let them have fun as well the libraries love this because it's very very predictable and they get turnouts even on cloudy nights it's amazing folks will come and say it's completely cloudy maybe even raining they'll say what can we see tonight outside I mean this next side the kind of questions that you might get from a patron so it's been very helpful for us to make this 90-minute program and by the way we do a lot of programs last year we did well over 100 library programs and we get really good reviews back and that just the staff really loves that next one this is really just showing some of the teamwork it takes you know one of the things that folks so much constant so often concentrate on this is a very typical of an amateur astronomer is they'll say okay we want to focus and play and think about this equipment and get it just perfect okay what they don't think about is all the people that it takes to support a program you got to build this up you got to make the changes you got to get it out there you got to support it in many ways you can see literally the teams we have on this and the number of telescopes and in just the first bill at 18 telescopes we basically had about a person for every telescope that we were upgrading that is very important because oddly enough a lot of folks think that amateur astronomers are really really good and nice guy but the truth is there are some that are really really good and there's a lot of them that are really just like the public they have never looked through a telescope they don't know anything about this and getting them involved in this process of building these telescopes and supporting them actually it's been a really big boost to our club we started in 2014 with about a hundred and forty members we have a hundred and sixty five right now and a lot of that i think contributed by the mere fact that these these folks are feeling like that actually do something and this telescope is easy to use so it builds their confidence as well too Vivian? So an important thing i've that we've actually advised in st louis so we've gotten our name out a few times we'd see there's really three parts of the program there's certainly the equipment part that's what the astronomers are going to think about you've also got to have a training program some for for both the staff and patrons and don't forget there will be a little things like red dot finders and something doesn't work that you got to repair and maintain you've got to build repair network none of this is particularly hard and if you don't build a supporting system of astronomers we had at one build we had 60 volunteers not just from our club but around the region that was involved in building those telescopes when they do that they get very confident that it will work and suddenly they're willing to volunteer to help maintain by the way most of the time the libraries are in their local markets so many times they'll dot the library around the corner and they'll be part of that and that makes them feel very you know it makes them very feel very much part of the entire process so it's not just the equipment it's all the people side of this that really makes this work and next there are some websites the new Hampshire was the first one right there that if you go there they've got a tremendous amount of stuff that we lean heavily on them when we started they get everything from what parts you need to buy to how exactly the telescope needs to be built and whatever else and one of the pushbacks we had from our members well we can we can approve this telescope and I said no we're not going to improve the telescope it's been working for a while why would we want to work best with something that is unproven that's how I'm going to convince the libraries it'll work it's already been proved we're not taking chances here and once they realize that the design was pretty solid they didn't really want to tinker with it before but you can go to New Hampshire's nhastro.com get all kinds of stuff from them there's also an Astro League really pretty good place and then of course our slash online.org is our local website that has quite a bit about our history about this and we are working and it's going to be a little bit before this is done on a national website called librarytelescope.org we've got several of us that's been working together including Vivian they'll take a little bit to get to this because right now we're focused on the eclipse but you certainly are welcome to contact me directly my contact information is there I am working on an expo for the next about a week and a half or two so don't be surprised if I don't get right back with you we've got a lot of people coming to that but we are very enthused about this program and we're very enthused about how support even important part of the nice guy network has been making this happen because the scheduling systems and all the resources have been just terrific for us thank you so much Don if you guys want to make this happen yourself definitely check out these websites that he's listed here and then also connect with your local amateur astronomy club they would be the perfect partner also solar system ambassadors who are comfortable with the night sky those are great places to say hey we want to do this in our library how can we set it up so those are good places to check to start with and we have a lot of questions one that Earl was asking that let's see he just wanted to know where to buy the telescope which I think is covered in Don that's in one of your slides in that last all right yeah we've uh we've basically purchased this through Orion Telescopes it's a standard model they have but we do a lot we do about six hours of upgrade so it's not just a lot of times we get the library says hey like I like to buy one would you ship it to me next week well we actually have to do a lot of work to make changes otherwise it won't last yeah so it's something to partner with your local amateur astronomy club on for sure yeah so Don I saw another question and now I can't find it it might have been in my email I'm very lost right now someone was asking because their library has a maker space if there is some sort of do-it-yourself guide so that they can purchase the as you said relatively inexpensive they're like $200 scope and then modify it themselves do you know of any place where they could find that info yeah it's on the New Hampshire side there's actually PDFs and everything right there that they can literally it'll take them step by step what to do and even places they can buy the parts splendid there were a couple of questions about what if something happens and someone damages the telescope how do you handle that at libraries well most of the libraries have a policy that whenever someone checks out the telescope that they're responsible for the different parts and I will say that out of two about almost two and a half years we've actually had one stolen and actually it was the car that was stolen not the telescope the telescope happened to be in the car and we had one situation where the bottom was damaged and I contacted Orion and it was 16 bucks that was it so the the parts are mostly pretty robust but they are responsible for fixing the telescope and that by the way makes them very careful with it they understand that so that I think is one of the reasons we haven't had many problems Mary Moore had asked us about getting some astroscan helium binoculars instead of telescopes do you think that that would be able to see enough detail or checking out binoculars something anyone does or do you know of that I don't know that might be for our attendees I do know that there are I've just someone Kelly in line what's the name of the binoculars there's a company that that that makes them with the filter built in and I will say they make a small model which is very tempting because it's more affordable and a larger model you'll want the larger model to see very much detail I can make out sunspots with the small model but it's very hard right oh good thank you Sarah those who were asking about the modified telescope get in touch with Sarah she's one of our NASA at my library partners what what is the brand of the telescope you're using that you're modifying Don it's the Orion Telescope it's the Orion Starblast Starblast four four point five we're quite good right great thanks great we have a lot of the questions that I think it's now been answered how about how do we contact you for more information about the NASA at my library kits oh that's a very good question so the kits that were available from the grant have unfortunately already been distributed however I'm going to be posting a shopping list so that you can purchase your own and frankly the the online training that we do and the activities that we in NASA wavelengths have developed are really the heart of those kits so go ahead and send me an email and I can make sure to let you know when I have that list available so that you can find the stuff so that you can do the already existing activities good question great there was Nancy wanted to know if the Puget Sound region of Washington has any kits or any solar system ambassadors and I think in the chat we showed you how to reach your solar system ambassadors Heather mentions that they're also volunteers and not paid yeah also the night sky network clubs have a lot of kits that they use a lot of the activities that you can find online are also available the clubs get the actual materials and the kits that make those and they often bring those to events too so you can ask them if they have any of those materials just scrolling through the chat I do see Kay mentioned and Amelia asked me to mention too I do pass around museum alliance webinars for the librarians on the on the webinar here from time to time but what's really important is a lot of them do require that you're a member of the museum alliance to log into the webinar so librarians you are more than welcome to join that group you are definitely already well represented there but if you want to join that group I believe Heather posted the link earlier maybe Heather if you can post it again and that way when I send you those webinar notices you won't have to hurry and hope yet approved ahead of time great it's the top of the hour I think we've answered all the questions great and I believe the for your colleagues who weren't able to join us today the recording of this will be posted on our website and I assume everyone else's websites as well so we will get those out to you on our newsletters oh thank you Heather that's great I hope everybody has a really wonderful time for the eclipse if you are in the path of totality you will definitely be able to access solar system ambassadors and amateur astronomers to join you if you're not in the path of totality for the eclipse it might be good to get some resources before the eclipse because most of our folks are going to be on the path it's we've been waiting for this for a long time they'll come do a program the week before but probably not yeah everyone have a great afternoon thanks everybody