The 2017 European Researchers’ Night was special for the Cagliari Astronomical Observatory for various reasons.
This year, we found ourselves at the end of a crazy summer, the full truth of which you’ll never know, simply because you’d be bored listening to all those electrifying details that turned many duties into just as many successes.
Moreover, the European Researchers’ Night is a team effort. With new blue shirts, picked up just hours before the event started, all the researchers, technologists, fellows, and even the administrative staff of the Observatory explained their research in detail: from exoplanets to pulsars, black holes to galaxy clusters.
However, every team needs a captain. This time, it was our colleague Sabrina Milia, who managed to coordinate a brief and intense event with many emails, office wanderings, tight phone calls, and short nights.
And here we are tonight with you, chatting face to face. You who like us on Facebook, who call us to ask if your five-year-old can join the workshop for eight-year-olds, you who email us to ask why, if the Earth revolves around the sun, the North is always on Polaris.
Today, many of you came. How many? We have no idea, because this time we decided not to obsess over lists, names, reservations, counts. This time we took a risk without having the slightest idea how many of you would come. Today we wanted a true, open, participatory, and experimental opening. We can say we succeeded with a fair amount of success. A very empirical and rough estimate could be between 250 and 300 people.
Our “researchers’ booths” were set up by taking tables from the canteen, which we call Astrocafé, and placing them outdoors thanks to favorable weather (and mind you, we know Murphy’s law well: today, with perfect forecasts, a “water bomb” would have been considered normal!).
On those tables, INAF-OAC researchers set up posters and even very complex models to help the public understand what they search for (and find) every day in our immense universe.
But that’s not all; the Technological Laboratories, Auditorium, Museum, Planetarium, and Astrokids labs with the paper model of SRT also opened their doors.
In short, at this point, we prefer to let the images speak for themselves, referring you to our Astrogallery at this link.
Thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts for the great participation. We look forward to seeing you next year, confident that we will improve even more.