This award will fund "Universe in the Park", an outreach program that is held throughout the State park system in Wisconsin. Each Universe in the Park workshop starts with a presentation on a current astronomical topic or a recent discovery by an undergraduate (or graduate) student form the University of Wisconsin. The students then lead an observing session for the public using large-aperture, but portable, telescopes.
In addition to the broad impact on the public participants, the students learn how to prepare and make presentations to lay audiences, hone their knowledge of the sky, and keep current on recent astronomical events. This award will fund approximately 60 Universe in the Park sessions and will reach an audience of several thousand. The web page for the program is: www.astro.wisc.edu/uitp/
Universe in the Park is extremely popular. Every weekend from Memorial Day and into October there were UW astronomers in a state park somewhere in Wisconsin engaging the public in astronomy. The average attendance was between 50 and 70 people, most of whom were camping in the park, but some of whom came from the surrounding community. The core of the intellectual merit of this award was to continue to offer the "Universe in the Park" program that has been carried out under NSF support for 13 years. UitP is based on thevery simple idea that the environment most conducive for sharingastronomy with the general public is outside under dark skies. Therefore, the venue for UitP continued to be Wisconsin's stateparks. In 2012 - the season funded by this award - we held nearly 60 UitP sessions in state parks andforests throughout Wisconsin between the end of May and the middle of October. Aside from the engagement of the public, the broader impact of this program was its effect on the students who led the vast majority ofthe UitP sessions. The program served as a valuable opportunity for University of Wisconsin students to become engaged in public outreach.Historically, an average of 15-20 astronomy graduate students participated in UitP over the course of the season with almost all of these students handling multiple UitP sessions throughout the summer. For many students, their first experience in conveying science to the general public comes from the UitP program the summer after their first year in graduate school. Since 2010, we expanded the program to undergraduate student who were spending the summer in Madison working on research projects. For the undergraduate students this was their first opportunity to engage in public outreachand, since most of them are Wisconsin citizens, an opportunity to giveback to their communities.
