Translator: Vida Talebian Reviewer: Mirjana Čutura
Good evening, everybody.
Everybody goes through their day-to-day life.
You got lots of things to think about,
you're trying to wake up in the morning and put on the coffee,
you got to get to work, you got to get to school,
you got to fight traffic, especially in Toronto,
and you've got a million and one things that you have to think about.
How many people during that day
think about the fact that we live on this little planet
that is orbiting a star
once every 365 and a quarter days?
Yeah!
And on top of all that,
the fact is, How many people can actually look up in the sky?
I mean everybody walks around today -
this is how everybody's looking, right?
How many people can actually see the stars?
We live in these major cities,
so the only way to see anything up in the sky,
we have to get out of the city.
So, you go out of the city, and you wind up seeing tons of stars.
You see the Milky Way.
And all these little pinpoints of light up in the sky are absolutely amazing.
But to see any detail, you need a telescope.
So, when I was 13 years old,
I convinced my parents to get me a telescope.
And of course, I very quickly started modifying it,
but this telescope had a lens, oh, about that big -
really, really big to me.
And with that, I was able to see the craters on the Moon.
I was able to see the bands on Jupiter.
I was able to see an amazing polar cap on Mars.
But one thing got me.
There was one wonderful evening in January -
and we all know what Canadian winters are like -
I went outside, took the telescope outside,
and pointed it up at this bright star which I knew was not a star.
And the light came in, I looked through the eyepiece,
and I saw the planet with the rings.
All of a sudden, this became really different.
It was real.
This was not a picture inside a book.
This was not something I saw on TV.
This was not something that, you know, today you'd see on the web.
This was light that had traveled over a billion kilometers,
traveling through space into my telescope to come up straight into my eyeballs.
It made a difference.
It registered inside my brain that this was real.
My life changed from that moment on.
These are amazing little events that take place.
Wow!
This was absolutely and amazingly different.
So, in 2008,
the David Dunlap observatory, just North of Toronto, was sold,
including the 200 acres of land around it.
So, this was really, really interesting
because if you go online
and you take a look at the fate of other observatories that have closed,
the pictures are not that good.
And some of you may remember
that even about a decade and a half before that,
the big planetarium in downtown Toronto also would close.
And here it is 20 years later, and it's still not open.
In the province of Ontario,
astronomy is mandated
in the grade six and grade nine curriculum.
There's also a course in grade 12 for Earth and Space Science.
So, how are people supposed to get that same wonderful experience
about astronomy, real astronomy
instead of just doing things in a book?
We had to do something; something had to be done.
The observatory itself, opened in 1935,
still houses the largest telescope in Canada.
In 1935,
it was the second largest telescope in the world.
And again, this beautiful, beautiful telescope -
what was going to happen to it?
So, the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada
has been around for about 150 years.
It's a group of amateur and professional astronomers
and people with a love and an interest in astronomy,
people from all walks of life.
It's a registered charity,
and its mission, its mandate, is to go out and do outreach.
The group has also been involved with the observatory,
helping with its outreach programs during the summer
since it opened in 1935.
So, we put a proposal together, we talked to the new owners,
and they liked what we had to say.
They gave us the keys.
And one thing was really interesting.
I mean, if you're volunteering,
don't assume someone else is going to do it.
It turns out, we were the only group that came forward with a proposal.
So, they gave us the keys, we go out to the observatory,
and of course, How hard can it be?
How? Really? How hard can it be?
Harder than we ever, ever imagined.
This is a big place, but these are the challenges.
This is why you get a group of people together,
people from different skill sets, different backgrounds and experiences
to pull together and solve problems.
And those are the challenges at being able to succeed.
So, we did that, and within six weeks,
we had the observatory back up and running.
We had put together a program schedule,
we had guest speakers come in,
and we turned it on and started running.
One of the things that was interesting, of course -
we got to have some extra, extra help
from one of the 40-year veterans, Archie de Ridder, at the observatory,
who taught us all the little intricacies of the telescope
as well as how to re-illuminize,
how to put a new coating on the two-and-a-half-ton piece of glass
which is the telescope's main mirror.
So, turning it on, we have people coming in.
Since that time, in the past six years,
we've had over 25,000 people come out to the observatory
and see what there is up there.
We have Scout groups, school groups, and Girl Guides
come out to all our program.
But that wasn't all.
Things keep changing.
We've wound up finding
that there were parents who wanted to bring out their young kids.
All our programs were essentially geared for teenagers and up.
So we listened to what they had to say, and we created family nights to come out.
We also created a sky lab
by taking a room,
painting the walls and projector white, a couple of projectors,
some pillows that my wife made.
And you now have an immersive experience of sitting on the floor.
We can put the sky across a seven-meter-wide wall.
We also created a craft room,
and so the younger kids and, of course, the older kids
could go in there and make space crafts.
They could make a solar system,
you could make constellations
and basically be engaged in hands-on activities,
especially for the kids.
You've heard that saying,
"If you build it, they will come."
The first year we were running it -
we open it up for the big Perseid meteor shower every August -
we had 300 people come out.
This was fantastic.
The next year, 2,000 people.
Two thousand people came out.
There's obviously an interest in astronomy in the area.
So astronomy is really big.
This year, we celebrated our 80th anniversary,
80th anniversary of the observatory.
Lots of different activities.
We even held a symposium
that invited some of the old astronomers who are now retired from the observatory
to come out and give talks.
They told us stories
and other bits of history that we'd never heard before.
And it was really amazing to hear what they had to say.
We also had about a dozen members of the Dunlap family come out as well:
even all the way down to the newest member
who is the great-great-grandson of David and Jessie Dunlap.
They were really happy to see - the university and the Dunlap family -
to see what has happened at the observatory
and fulfilling its legacy as it continues on into the future.
What evolved out of this,
it was no longer just about a group of people
who volunteered to save a telescope.
There was lots more going on.
We wound up providing fun, engaging educational programs
for the public and for the community.
We also did something to inspire the next generation of students
to look at possibly engaging in science careers.
And also more important,
we became a best-practice model for other facilities
that want to do something similar.
And now there's a group out on the West Coast,
dealing with an observatory,
and one in Australia that also got shut down,
and now a group is doing something about that.
But what's really interesting about all this
is we found that the most important fact,
that something we didn't even realize,
is the effect that it had on our own volunteers.
We started out with a small core of volunteers
who were really engaged and put all this together.
And as we did more and more programs, there were more and more people
not only just joining the organization,
but also coming out and volunteering.
And these volunteers had become more and more engaged
not only with helping the public,
trying to inspire the public and show them all these cool things
and make those wonderful aha moments for all of them,
but they've also become more engaged within our own organization.
It's really difficult for most groups to try and get volunteers to be engaged.
Here, they've been able to rally around something
and also help the rest of the organization
either in other projects as well as in its leadership.
This is an interesting photo.
It's the Moon. Right?
I took this with my iPhone held up to the eyepiece of the big telescope.
It's amazing what modern technology can do today.
The other thing is, we can also do science with this image
and take it into high schools and get them to do science projects.
But the cool thing about this
and what's really unique about observing the Moon
is when people climb up the ladder to the telescope
and look through the big eyepiece.
The moon is so bright that we can see the moonlight hitting their eyes.
We can see that they are seeing this light coming from the Moon.
It's only 385,000 kilometers -
not that far, it's close.
But seeing it hit their eyes,
and you start to wonder and know that they are being engaged.
You can see their faces light up
when they're obviously experiencing these particular moments.
When you think about how many people have looked through a telescope
in their lifetime -
very few people ever get the chance to look through a telescope,
let alone a big telescope.
So, these are the moments that we try to inspire,
these are the issues we're trying to deal with
to make those little sparks,
that people will then ask questions.
It's been really interesting
because we hear the questions from the adults,
we hear questions from little kids
that come walking up and want to know a little bit more.
This is why we put together programs,
and volunteers have gone out and done this.
Volunteerism matters.
I challenge all of you to think about what you could do
with a group of people pulled together to improve something in your community.
I also challenge you to take a chance,
think big,
and go out and make a difference.
Because, really, how hard can it be?
(Laughter)
Thank you very much.
(Applause)