Stargazing at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard

The overall aim of this project is to engage Portsmouth area families and members of the general public with the astrophysics, cosmology and gravitation research undertaken at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth through a large scale evening event held at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.

This STFC Small Award will allow us to maintain and grow a successful public engagement partnership in Portsmouth. We have run this event at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard (PHD) annually since 2013. Holding the event at this iconic location allows us to attract local people who know the Dockyard and might be less willing to come on to the campus of the University of Portsmouth for a similar event. However shortening budgets for the Learning Departments of PHD put the continuation of this event at risk if we cannot demonstrate an ability to cover some of the costs of keeping this site open after dark. To solve this dilemma, half of the funding we ask for in this Small Award will cover the staffing costs of keeping this historic site open after it normally closes.

The other half of the funding we request will allow us to evaluate the impact that this event has on the people who attend, both for the upcoming event in 2017, but also looking back to events since 2013. We believe this annual event has a significant impact on the local families and members of the public who attend, in raising their awareness of world class, STFC funded research taking place right here in Portsmouth. In order to keep the costs of evaluation down, as well as enable a secondary aim of educating a Portsmouth undergraduate about evaluating the impact of science communication, we plan to do this evaluation as part of a funded summer undergraduate research project. We will identify an undergraduate to take this on who is one of the volunteers at the 31st Jan 2017 event. In the summer, under our supervision this undergraduate will make use of evaluation metrics and data collection to attempt to measure what our audience does, feels, values and understands as a result of our events. This will not only improve future events, but also provide a case study (which we aim to write up for publication) about the impact of similar local Stargazing themed events held all over he country.

We advertise this event locally, through online networks, and at local schools. In all previous years we have had more demand for tickets than we can fill, as well as local press items covering the activities. One goal of the evaluation proposed here is to help us better target our advertising and release of tickets in future years to reach the audience who get the most benefit from attending.

We will make use of links to public engagement networks to disseminate the results of our evaluation. This will include IOP Outreach & Public Engagement Network meetings, the BIG mailing list, PSI COMM, SEPnet website. We will share our findings with other SEPnet partners most of which run Stargazing Events, as well as the network of Ogden Science Officers Dr Gupta is part of.

We plan to work with the summer undergraduate intern to write-up the research projects as an article for e.g. CAPJournal, or Astronomy & Geophysics to disseminate our findings about the impact of local Stargazing events using Portsmouth as a case study.