As astronomy in
the Philippines is slowly gaining popularity, the bulk of activities
still revolves around outreach and telescope viewing activities. I
was in college when I first organized these kind of events, and I've
been doing this ever since. From an organizers perspective, it isn't
uncommon to hear questions like:
“I only knew about this
now”
“Ba't ngayon lang
nagkaganito?”
“Can I know when your
next event is?”
“Open po ba sa public?”
We've all had to deal
with them one way or another and we can only do so much to market
these events. Because of this some members of the astronomy community
have tried to establish a single access portal to learn about these
kind of activities.
Philippine astronomy was
the first web portal of all astronomy related activities and events
for the Philippines. It was maintained by Raymund Ang who was a
member of the Astronomical League of the Philippines at that time.
Unfortunately, Raymund didn't get much support for the project as not
much content was shared from the community. He was also based in
Bacolod so most content was gathered from social media.
Philippine Astronomy
Directory was a single-page directory for links to various groups and
institutions. There is not much information about this site and it
hasn't been updated in years.
Philippine Astronomy
Forum was originally a yahoo forum group that eventually turned into
a Facebook group. It was initiated by James Kevin Ty of the
Astronomical League of the Philippines. The forum talks about
anything astronomy, and there are lots of content on
astrophotography.
Dark Sky Network
Dark Sky Network was a
Facebook group designed to share astronomy events to the community
for collaborative participation. This was an open-access initiative
by Anthony Urbano that allowed members who were available to take
part in these setups. The group was eventually removed in Facebook
years later when the objectives were not met and the content was
filled with members' astro photos rather than events.
Many of us astro-bloggers
promote events from different groups. On my part, my postings and
listings of Philippine astronomy content was eventually shifted to a
tab on this blog as a directory which I maintain to the best of my
knowledge.
Filipino Astronomy
Community is another Facebook group that discusses astronomy content
from the Philippines. It was initiated by Jerome de Leon and contains
more of an academic content, as well as opportunities here and
abroad.
Astronomy PH is a
quarterly e-zine that promotes science communication and
collaboration between members of the local astronomy community. This
is a project of the GAIA-Open Research and Collaborative Learning
Experience. The content is crowd-sourced from the different groups,
and news and announcement of past and future events can be found in
the finder section. It's most recent initiative is it's twitteraccount where the community can tweet their news/events.
While some of these have
been discontinued either due to lack of time or support from the
community, content not matching objective, or the over-loading of
astro-photos, they are worth mentioning to provide us with insight as
to future efforts. Currently there is a discussion between different
astronomy groups being initiated by Kashogi Astapan of creating a new
web portal for Philippine Astronomy content. I have high hopes for
this initiative and wish that past examples can guide this project
into a truly collaborative direction where everyone can benefit.
No comments:
Post a Comment