 Hello everyone. Thank you for making it to the last session and listening to me and my colleague Sheila talk to you about how we've been using the Royal Astronomical Society archives in astronomy education activities. We're going to outline the background to the workshops, how we've chosen audience, how we've planned them, what it was like to run the programme, the immediate impact on the participants and next steps with our library or archive ac yn fwyaf ar gyfer y ddefnyddio ardi. O'r gweithio cyd-fylltion arlau o'r dyn nhw, cyd-fylltio'r ddodol ac y dyfodol o'r oedd o'r astronomau a gyfphysig. Gweithio'r ddwych ar gyfer cyd-fylltion, sy'n fwyaf ar 1820. Aelod, sy'n ddiweddio'r oedderfyniadau, sy'n ddyn nhw, ddyddai'r astronomau, byddai'r meddl, ac mae'r gwaith, ..y gallwch, ganfacelliwllol, ehwseidwch ac cael ei alchydag i'r rywbeth. Ryf wedi bod gweithio industrydd yn cynhyrchu... ..yng ng résult ei psychodau i'r sgoleng. Yn Gweithreibol, Roedd Ysgrifol Cymru yn gyfunio'r Gymraeg... ..y wertho'i adwerthio a'r ddechrau yma yn 2014. Mae'r Ysgrifol Cymru yn linell i'r RAS... ...i ysgrifol yma yn dweud cyhoeddiad... ..o'i adgatio. gwahodd ar gyfer cerdd, ond i'w ddod o'r cerddau cymdeithasol ac oeddiad o'r llwythydd, rydyn ni heddiw. Rydyn ni'n mynd i'r cyhoedd, rydyn ni'n mynd i'r cymdeithasol, ac mae'r rhagorau sydd yn cael ei gweithio cynllunio cyffredigol. Yn ydych chi'n gweld, rydyn ni'n mynd i'n rhaid yn ysgrifennu ymlaen i gyfathol ac nid i'n rhaid yn ei gweithio i yw ysgrifennu. ac oedd y gael ym�eddoedd ar y Rhysgfaith ac mae'n rhaid i'w llysiau i'w pethol. Felly mae'n rhaid i ddweud o wneud rhywbeth o'r gwaith hwn o'r gael. A ysgwrs, rhaid i'w rhaid i'w ddweud o'r cyffredin, mae'n gweithio ar y yrwbeth pob gweithio'r cyffredin a'n gwneud i gael y ddweud o'r gwleidau cyffredin o'r cyffredin yn dweud o'n dweud o'r cyffredin. In 2020 we've got our bison tennery and part of that is part of the objectives for that are going to be working with new audiences, particularly those not traditionally engaged with astronomy and geophysics. And as a diversity officer I've also got a hidden agenda of trying to get more diversity into everything that we do. The Caroline and Comets project is just one of many things that we offer. It is a mission to develop new audiences matched my remit to increase the use of the library and the archives to fulfil the society's charitable aim of promoting the understanding of astronomy and geophysics. This means not just providing a service for fellow and external researchers who are already specialists in their subjects, but making the collections and what we can learn from them accessible to members of the public who might have varying levels of pre-existing understanding. Felly, dod yn fawr o'r ffordd oed yn gweithio cymdeithasol yma mae'n iawn i'r rhan o'r ysgolwlad yn gyllidion. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio, ond mae gennym eich gwmar-gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Felly, byddwn i'r llwynt yma o gweithio'r sgolwyr yn ymgyrch gyda'r meddwl i'r phirgrin, mae hyn yn ddod i'i gofyn i gwybr yn oed yn gweithio'r hwnnw sy'n gweithio'r hwnnw, a'r ydych chi adreithio, wrth gael yn y gychael, fel lŵr, gyda chi'n blaen nhw, i siŵr hynny. Fi wrth gael yn dangos cyfrailion i'r cyfrifaturiwr, ond y gallwn am gŷnol iawn i'r ffordd neu myllід nôl, mae'n gallu o'r pwn honno i sylwedd, neud gwneud o bwysig oed, a rhai i'n ddech chi'n hefyd, dresser o'r clywedd cyffredinol o'r cyfrifaturi o'r gwaith. Rwy'n meddwl arnynt gael eu hunain i'n ddwrs reisvar o'r ddaeth, ac rwyf i pa unigwethaf i'r ffrasil. Fe i'r hynny'n gwneud hynny'n ziwggyntai'r brosiect. Rydym e wedi gweld'u unig i ddigon gwerthu'r capital cynllunydd, felly mae'r cwmwylliant o boblau, amgolio gael cwygoedd ac gweld. Ac mae wnaeth erbyr eich gweithio fit y cwmwylliant dweud yr unig cynn renewedigomeil, o brif wojnwyddoedd y bwysigol primary yr bod wedi ei wneud ar hyn o'r defnyddio'r hammerrwyr. A gyddiwch bod erbyn bod nodi gyda'rming o gromod yr unig yw dweud ar hyn o'r bobl a'r modd rai'r ffordd hefyd, ac maen nhw'n ddydd i'r hyn o'r bwysigol ac yn ysbygol o Caroline Herschel. Brif wojnwydd y RAS'r ysbryd dweud yw William Herschel, Caroline Herschel, wysigol ar hyn oed ar hyn oed. Mae'n meddwl hefyd, a'r hwnau i amdano gweld peirio ar y byddai oedd wneud rahen nhw'n meddwl. Mae'r newidol mewn rhais. Mae'r meddwl eich shells oeddo yn 1828 a hen wrth angen gwybod yn gyfrifio'r rhan o niechnais.' Mae gennym rhaid i'r unig o dyfodol a'r hefyd o'r warganiad ag oed yn gwneud. Rhaid i y rhan oherwydd yr Argyfforddau a'r Argyfforddau i'r Argyfforddau i'r rhan oed yn rhaith? ac we have her observation notebooks in the archives. So it was kind of serendipitous that all these things married together. We met some actors from an organisation called Spectrum Drama who've been working with the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. And they had Caroline within their historical characters database. So we worked with them to formulate her character further using the archives that we've got. And we could concentrate on her history and comets. And it was nice because it linked to the RAS, it linked to my background, but it also provided a female role model, particularly in astronomy, which is some place that lots of role models tend to be male. It also happened that I was able to make an analogy of a comet using household materials. So that played into what we wanted to do. And at the time around 2014 was when a spacecraft called the Rosetta spacecraft was actually met a comet after 10 years flying through space and orbited for two years. So everything came together really nicely. Our collections, skills and resources worked together to make our workshop. So in terms of delivering the workshop, we had to base it around our building. We have a lecture theatre, we have the library and we have a meeting room. So we have three rooms that we could use. And we did it as a three-part carousel where students would interact for 30 minutes in each room and then move around so that they have the full experience. We started with a pilot of just a small number of primary school students and then expanded so that the whole programme can actually take 60 students at a time, which tends to be a full year group. It's quite something, hearing sort of young people moving about our very old building and I think some of the staff were quite surprised when it happened for the first time. Logistically, the building is old. We have to do lots of health and safety and risk assessments. Also with working with things like dry ice. We have to show the young people that they have to respect a lot of the building as well as the archives that they come into play with. We have to think about things like safeguarding and making sure that people who were with the children had DBS checks. And then in terms of the costs involved, it wasn't too high cost because this was in our work remit, so we did this for free. And then with the funding, we could buy some of the resources that we needed and pay for the actor. So in the three-part carousel, the students meet Caroline Herschel, played by an actor from Spectrum Drama for 30 minutes. They interact with her observation notes in the library with Sean. And then for the last 30 minutes, they have a science lecture by me about comets and then we make a comet at the end. So the comet demonstration is quite fun. I start with about a 20 minute talk with pictures and slides about missions to comets and some information about what comets are actually made from. So they're basically a big dirty snowball that live at the edges of space, way past Pluto. And they're made from ice because there's leftover material from when the sun formed and so far away from the sun that it's ices. And they orbit the sun, but on a highly elliptical orbit. So they only orbit every 80 to 100 years. And we talk about the fact that the next comet that will come into play will be in 2061 when the young people will be a lot older and some of the teachers won't be around. So that's quite a sobering experience. And then I do the demonstration. So because of the missions to comets, we've learnt what comets are made from and we use analogies that we can find in the kitchen or at home. So, for example, we talk about methane. On earth you can find methane in cow farts and we talk about alcohols and we pour all these things into a bowl. And then we add dry ice of frozen carbon dioxide to the mix and that freezes all the components into a big dirty snowball. But it looks quite spectacular at the same time. And then it's the live session. This starts off much more sedately looking at drawings of telescopes made by William Herschel from 7 to 20 to 40 feet high. We have a small collection of instruments and objects and among them are some of the smaller speculum mirrors that William Herschel made for his telescopes. We bring one out for the children and invite them to examine it, imagine starlight bouncing off the mirror into the eyes of the astronomer using the telescope. I mean, as Sheila explained, there are often three sessions running simultaneously. So, looking at this speculum mirror, for children who have already had an audience with the actor Caroline Herschel, it gives them a chance to connect that shiny, precision-made object with Caroline's anecdote of sieving horse manure to make the mould that the speculum mirror would be cast in. So, we try to connect these sessions in various different ways. Having talked about the equipment that you need to carry out astronomical observations, we talk about the practice of keeping a diary or journal to record those observations. And the image here shows Caroline's first sighting of what would turn out to be her third comet of the ape that she discovered. The children find her handwriting fairly easy to read and they're quite willing to read it out loud in spite of unfamiliar letters and words. And in a group, we interpret the text and the image. For example, we ask, why is the comet sketched in a circle and what is the impact of weather on astronomical observations? Now, as Victoria said, providing access to fragile manuscripts always has to be balanced with the preservation needs of the document. There are several different notebooks covering a number of years of observations and the aim is to use a different notebook each time so that there's no burden placed unduly on one manuscript for these sessions. If the group is large, the notebook is placed in a glass case and we only look at this page opening. If it's a smaller group of, say, seven or fewer and there are loads of adults to help to supervise, we will, as a group, all be able to look at the manuscript. I can turn the pages and that way the children can see how Caroline Herschel steadily charted the progress of this celestial object across the sky allowing her to build the hypothesis that this is actually a comet and not another kind of thing that you'd see. So, Sheila has touched on Halley's comet. We bring other parts of our collections into the last part of the library session. You can see the photograph of the 1910 apparition of Halley's comet here. We have been, from the 1880s to the 1970s, the society collected loads of pictures from observatories around the world which it copied and sold to its fellows for teaching and research. So, we're not selling analog photos anymore, but we do have loads of pictures of Halley's comet, probably printed off in 1986 during the last time Halley's comet came around. So, this is just a good bit of stock for us to use for a matching pairs exercise. We hand out the photographs to the group. I asked the children to find somebody else who's got a photograph that looks exactly like theirs. Once everyone's matched up with somebody else, that they turn over the label. As a group, we all read out the dates and the place that the comet was photographed. And then the children realised, wow, this comet was photographed over a period of months from April to June that year. And it reinforces the point that comets behave really differently to, say, meteors, like a flash in the pan or stars on the moon. It's a manifestation that's going to be there for several months. So, after that, we invite the children to have a go at doing their own observations. We hand out black paper and white pencils and invite them to draw from the photographs on the table. And this helps to reinforce Sheila's lesson on what comets are like, but the anatomy of a comet, the coma and the tail. And a lot of children just really enjoy drawing. It's part of our cross-curricular approach. So, we've been running this programme for maybe two years and maybe just over two years. And we have offered it within the RAS and sometimes out to schools as well, if they can't get in. We're slightly limited by the fact that our building is in central London. So we have been a little bit too London-centric for my liking, but there's nothing we can do about that. We have reached over 450 students outside of the RAS and we've had over 400 into the RAS over the last few years. And that's over 10 schools, working with over 10 schools within the area. We've offered this programme or versions of this programme to undergraduates, teacher training and adult audiences as well. And it's always been really well received. So we're not driven by evaluation at the RAS, but we should do more of it and it would be useful, particularly if we are funded externally again. But in terms of verbal feedback, the kids love the wow factor of the different sessions and they particularly like being in such an old building and looking at an old library and they like our toilets because they're kind of posh. And the teachers appreciate the cross-curricular nature of the programme, the fact that it's really attention-grabbing and it does link to the curriculum with the space topic and the interaction with the libraries, obviously the main attraction there. We have had some nice feedback from questionnaires and we also got sent a set of letters that the teachers made the students right. And so we've got this big stack of anecdotal evidence of how positive our project has been. But there are always places to improve, obviously. One of the issues with the impact is that it tends to be one-off impact. We see the students once and then we don't interact with them ever again. So we can't really measure how impactful it has been, but anecdotally it's all been good. So it has been hard to improve because we've had so much positive feedback, but we're very aware that we need to do more evaluation and better evaluation in order to measure what we need to do. In terms of furthering this particular project, we want to stretch out to different historical figures based on the collections that we've got. So, for example, Sir Isaac Newton, because we own a first-edition Principia in which he highlights quite a lot of his main laws and the idea of gravity. And we also have a piece of apple wood from Wollstock Manor, which is where he used to live. So I kind of spin that into... It's a piece of the tree that he sat under when the apple fell on his head. And we also want to do a project similar to this one, but with Ada Lovelace. One of the big issues with formulating new projects is funding issues, but there we go. It's been really nice because it's been the first big thing that Siarann and myself have worked on together. It's been nice because we've been teaching new audiences, ticking off our charitable objectives and using the library, the lecture theatre and the council room in ways that have never really been used before. And most of the teachers and the students that we've reached has initially been through word-of-mouth and primary school teachers work together in networks and they talk a lot. But like I said, the downside is that it's London-centric. So this particular project came about almost by chance and Serendipitous overlapping of our skills, but it's been a great structure for the future and we've shown our fellows, our members, that we can combine history, cutting-edge research and open the building successfully. So it really shows the importance of a kind of cross-curricular approach and our different skillsets in building a really successful programme. Yeah, it's just been a great chance for us to collaborate and you really can't overstate how much work Sheila has done to do that out, which will really reach out to the local schools in a city London. That's something that I wouldn't have known where to start. So thank you.