“The sky in your living room”: a streaming format for live astronomy events

During the last year, the outreach community had to rearrange the way of communicating science and resort to new tools for education in schools. In particular, the impossibility of organizing public events has encouraged the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) to find an alternative way to engage remotely with the general public and students. The team of EduINAF, the official INAF online magazine for education and public outreach, has developed a new format for live streaming events, titled “The sky in your living room” (“Il cielo in salotto”), to be organised around specific astronomy events such as eclipses, comets, different Moon phases, etc. The format has been designed to be centred around a live stream of telescope observations, which takes advantage of INAF’s network of observatories spread all over the Italian peninsula. The images of those telescopes are commented live by the INAF researchers, presenting the latest scientific results about the topic selected for each specific event. The team running these events has researched several options to find the best and simplest technical tools for live streaming by using only a computer and an internet connection. 

In this talk, we will present the first live event of the format, organized for the Super Moon of the 26th of May, with a focus on both its educational and outreach contents and possible fallouts, and on the technical and communicative solutions chosen for the streaming, including lessons learnt that could be of interest to colleagues organising similar events in other countries.