Description
In astronomy outreach, 2D visual aids are traditionally used to explain astronomical topics, but these can fail to effectively convey complex ideas and engage a young audience. To address this, we created an interactive workshop series for under-served lower secondary school children (ages 11-14) in South Wales to explain star formation using 3D films. The visuals of our films are generated using a combination of standard 2D simulation videos and telescope images, which an adaption of a stereoscopic effect called “anaglyph” is applied then to. This effect creates and combines cyan/red filtered versions of a 2D image, to produce a 3D image, when viewed with dual cyan/red lensed glasses. Using this setup our audience visits a nearby spiral galaxy, zooms thorough it and visits various astronomical objects (stars, nebulae, planets) where the science of these is explained. Here we showcase part of our film, demonstrate how the educators can easily make and incorporate anaglyphs into their own talks, and present the feedback we’ve received so far.
