Resumen:

In the summer of this year NTV, the educational channel of the Chilean television channel TVN, broadcasted the first six episodes of the show “AstroMicro”. The event was a significant milestone for this interdisciplinary scientific communication project, bringing astronomers, animators, filmmakers, producers, writers, and project managers together. “AstroMicro”, jointly funded by the TV channel, the Chilean Astronomy Society, and the Chilean Agency for Research and Development (Agencia Chilena de Investigación y Desarrollo), occurs on a “micro” where all the astronomical concepts are revisited with simple but accurate jargon relating the different experiences of the diverse passengers to everyday experiences in a bus. This approach avoids hierarchical communication within the team from the very early stages of the project, fostering communication and avoiding outsourcing the creative components of the product. In this talk, we will share details of the story behind the production, from the original idea to the screening of the first episodes.

Resumen:

We have installed a national fireball detection network consisting of a set of 20 stations covering the entire Uruguayan territory. One of the challenges we face is analyzing the large volume of data generated. For this reason, it has been key to promote a Citizen Science project. In order to disseminate the BOCOSUR Project, we created a website with general information and a fireball report form. Along with the installation of the stations in high schools throughout the country, we held introductory talks presenting the work related to fireballs. To date, we have given more than 30 talks, reaching a population of over 1000 students. Furthermore, four virtual training workshops were held for high-school teachers and their students interested in contributing to the analysis of the videos generated by the network. Each workshop consisted of three meetings. In the first two meetings we focused on presenting the project and introducing the most relevant theoretical concepts. Likewise, we deepen the knowledge about the operation of the stations, and particularly how to manually classify videos. The third meeting aims to put into practice what has been learned about video classification. We have recorded a total of 141 participants enrolled throughout the four editions, of which 105 were students and 36 teachers from over 40 different institutions. Over the course of these editions, 70 participants have successfully completed all the activities. In the last edition more than 1400 videos were analyzed and around 170 meteors were found. It is of great importance to have a large database of classified videos, not only of fireballs, to train a machine learning classification algorithm that was developed as an Electrical Engineering final project by the AutoBol group (Ballestrino et al. 2022).