Recently, we did live space weather forecasting at our local natural history museum during a science fair. Scientific organizations presented many different kinds of activities, and people of all ages walked around, stopping where something attracted their interest.
It was quite challenging a situation. How to start? How to get those interested (and ourselves) focused? How to achieve a reasonable timing while letting people ask whenever they had a question?
We soon realized that all those wonderful slides we had prepared were too much for the audience. There were simply too many new concepts involved. The very idea of there existing such a thing as weather in space was new to most visitors. We spent much more time than expected discussing every single image. So we radically reduced the number of slides to five and focused on data/images where phenomena can directly be observed.
We combined the space weather forecast with sunspot observation using mobile telescopes and SunSpotters, and offered hands-on activities related to ultraviolet light.
I uploaded a generic space weather forecast to our Slideshare account. It can be adapted to your public event. Simply insert the latest images and videos from the GSFC SDO site, Helioviewer and, for the latest auroras, the Space Weather Gallery.
FLARECAST outreach on SlideShare
