Transcript

NAYRA RODRIGUEZ EUGENIO:

I am Nayra Rodriguez Eugenio. And I am the coordinator of the educational project with robotic telescopes here at the IAC. I also work on communication and public engagement projects. So the advantage of having here robotic telescopes from other institutions, like The Open University, is that we can have observing time on those telescopes. And we can also collaborate and join efforts to do educational projects together in our Spanish educational community and in other communities, in the UK, for example.

We are working together in the first project, which is about variable stars, the same, probably very similar to the one that you are going to work with. And the idea is that students can discover new variable stars and be the first one, be the first ones to identify those stars as variable ones and make a discovery. One of the great things of this kind of projects is that normal people can use professional telescopes that are tools that, in the past, were only available for professional astronomers. So now you can see the universe with the same tools that we have done for the last 20 or 30 years and also contribute to real science projects and contribute to science in the end.