[X] My Assistant

[elakdawalla]

In two weeks I'm going to be delivering an hour-long talk at Amherst College for the class reunions (it's my 10th reunion). Mostly I plan to talk about what's cool in space right now, how you can get images from the Web and what kind of fun you can have with them, etc (with lots of cool examples from this forum). But as I was beginning to think about what I was going to say, I asked myself how all of the different Reunion classes -- the classes of 1996, 1991, 1986, etc... -- experienced space exploration differently, in terms of what missions were active and returning data when they were in college. So I made up a set of slides showing where we had active missions returning data for each of those 5-year periods. What do you think of these? Any suggestions for improvements / changes / pointing out of errors would be greatly appreciated.





(Also, if anyone wants to play with the Photoshop file I used for the background, I'll be happy to share it.)

--Emily

[ljk4-1]

Emily, overall I liked the concept, but I have these reservations:

I presume you are speaking to an audience that, while educated (either that
or they sure didn't get their money's worth from Amherst ), may not be
into space exploration and astronomy.

The successive images of the same worlds with just the names and dates
changing may lose your audience's interest rather quickly. Too many
facts and especially numbers and other raw data tends to do that with
novice audiences.

May I suggest that you keep the idea of showing how much and what we
have explored over the decades, but then add different perspectives
of the Sol system that are relevant to the dates of each slide. I would
also add at least sample images of some of the more famous probes
and some of the images of the worlds they took.

Perhaps this may be more than you had planned for your talk, but I
just wanted to give you these suggestions. Good luck with it.

[dvandorn]

May I suggest that you keep the idea of showing how much and what we
have explored over the decades, but then add different perspectives
of the Sol system that are relevant to the dates of each slide.

Good idea! Perhaps the early slides ought to contain the best images of the planets available from Earth-bound telescopic sources, and as we see exploration occurring, replace such poor-resolution images with those made possible by the listed missions? That way you get a feeling for the expansion of knowledge as our efforts have proceeded?

For future missions to places we haven't yet visited, you can place a question mark over the current best-resolution images, to indicate that we don't know what we'll find when we get there...?

-the other Doug