With the BuioMetria Partecipativa project I have been invited to give a talk during the fourtieth anniversary celebrations of the Unione Astrofili Senesi . This will be at the Montarrenti observatory, a few kilometers South of Siena.
You are all invited, both to get to know better our project, as well as to learn about the activities of the Siena amateur astronomer association.
The programme starts at 9.30AM and ends at 1.30PM. The BuioMetria Partecipativa talk is scheduled at 11.15AM.
This week’s English version of the newsletter works in “retrofit” mode for the events, as they took place on Tuesday in Milano, but due to lots of things moving I was not able to send it out earlier.
Yesterday, May 30, I gave a lecture at the Politecnico di Milano in the morning, followed by an evening presentation about the BuioMetria Partecipativa project at the Lucernate public library.
A substantial news for the week was the signature of a memorandum of understanding between Attivarti.org (the small NGO through which we manage our more experimental activities) and the Italian National Research Council’s Institute of Biometeorology. To learn more about this, please check the related post.
Ten years ago, today
On May 28, 20017, in the Grosseto Province Council hall we had a press conference concerning our palla a 21 to Chicago mission. On this occasion we announced a four-team demonstration tournament (to be held on June 30, 2007), which would have represented the final event prior to the departure of our expedition to the US of A. For readers of Italian, you may check the articles published on Il Tirreno and La Nazione back then.
Heads up for next week: next even on Tuesday, June 6, 2017 from 4PM to 8PM in Grosseto. More information will follow, or write to info@pibinko.org if you can’t wait.
A memorandum of understanding was signed by the Italian National Research Council’s Institute of Biometeorology and Attivarti.org.
This act creates a liaison between a research organization and a small NGO active in outreach activities providing a formal setting for the joint initiatives that these two subjects have been conducting for over three years, starting from the work undertaken within the “Loss of the Night Network” on artificial light at night.
Among the outcomes of this collaboration to date, we can mention the experimental campaign undertaken in March 2015 between the Farma Valley and the CNR Campus in Florence(cfr. blog di Attivarti.org) and the aticle for the International Journal of Sustainable Lighting published in February 2017.
The Loss of the Night Network project ended in October 2016, but Attivarti.org and CNR IBIMET saw the interest in continuing some form of coordinated activitiy, focusing on two topics. The firs is research, outreach, and technology transfer on artificial light at night and light pollution. The second is about experimental campaigns, especially conducted in citizen science mode.
Both these lines of activity fall in a path which was started nine years ago by the BuioMetria Partecipativa project, which is gradually consolidating and receiving increasing attention not only in the research field, but also by other public and private organizations. The points of contact for the activities are Luciano Massetti for CNR IBIMET and Andrea Giacomelli for Attivarti.org.
The CNR Institute of Biometeorologystituto di Biometeorologia was founded in 1970, and has grown in the years researching numerous topics on agrigulture and environment. Its headquarters are in Florence, and it has other offices in, Bologna, Sassari and Roma.
Attivarti.org was founded in 2011 by a small team of interdisciplinary experts who were collaborating since 2006, to deal with NGO aspects of promotion and protection of lesser known assets in the areas of culture, environment, and open innovation with a strong participatory component. The base of the association is in Torniella, a hamlet in the Farma Valley, Southern Tuscany, but the team operates internationally.
For more information: info@attivarti.org o l.massetti@ibimet.cnr.it
With the Etruschi from Lakota missing from the scene, on this round, during the lecture on Land protection and planning: interdisciplinary experiences from ten years of projects from a lesser known area of Southern Tuscany, I showed the unplugged version of Il contadino magro (i.e. The Skinny Farmer) taken from the Apr. 7 webinar for the GeoforAll network and the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS).
The lecture was in fact the continuation of the webinar, removing information not relevant for an Italian audience (like the slides on where is Italy), and adding some analyses conducted over the past couple of months, such as the analysis of demographics for some of the hamlets in our area with data since the 17th century, and slides on various initiatives which were not mentioned in April (work on alien species reduction, managemen of hydrogeologic hazard, etc.)
Thanks again to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Politecnico, and namely to Alessandro Ceppi and Marco Mancini, for the hospitality.
Having seen the very cool flyer prepared by CSBNO for the May 30 evening event, I felt the need to make it even with a flyer for the morning seminar at the Politecnico di Milano.
A presentation of both events is available: Politecnico (10.30AM) and Lucernate Civic Centre (9PM)
A video I produced for the crowdfunding of the third album from Etruschi from Lakota.
Please go to the Musicraiser campaign (closing on July 1st)…with many Kudos to Wolfgang Scheibe and Tattistampa: in addition to creating the T-shirts he also lent to Dario Canal the washboard that you see lately in their live shows, in addition to the performance you have below:
Please note: if you or your friends would like to receive these communications by e-mail, you can subscribe to our mailing list on http://www.attivarti.org/lists (selecting the option for the English-language newsletter).
This said, the public side of this week will be quiet, in preparation for the May 30 presentations in Milano (AM at the Politecnico and PM at the Lucernate Community Centre).
Meanwhile you can:
Also: be sure to keep an eye on http://www.pibinko.org/calendar, with five events coming up in June, all in Southern Tuscany (during the Summer season we will tend to roam a bit less, so you will have more opportunities of visting us in our base in the Tuscan hills.
For more information: info@pibinko.org
As a part of the celebrations for the tenth anniversary of the mission which brought to Chicago, Illinois, the ancient game of palla a 21 (or palla eh!) Attivarti.org in collaboration with pibinko.org is organizing its first ball construction course.
The course will be held in the music room (first floor) of the Torniella Philarmonic Society centre in Torniella, from 3PM to 6PM of Saturday, June 17, 2017. The tutor will be Ilo Ferrandi, one of the few active ball makers today.
To participate you must register by sendin an e-mail to palla21@attivarti.org. Admission to the course is free, but it will be possible (and appreciated) if you will contribute with a donation to support the calendar of events and initiatives by pibinko.org/Attivarti.org, dedicated to the promotion and protection of lesser known assets in the fields of culture, environment, and open innovation.
The course will have some theory, concerning the history of the ball, and a review of materials, tools and procedures to build it. A hands-on part will then follow, with Ilo Ferrandi helping the participants to create their own ball. At the end of the course an “aperitivo” will be in the air, and if the weather is nice you may actually try to play, possibly getting some tutoring by one of the palla a 21 players, who are just starting their training, with the traditional palla a 21/palla eh! tournaments coming up from mid-July.
Three pages written just after the September 2016 Artificial Light at Night conference for Nuovo Orione, one of the two reference magazines for amateur astronomers. The article was eventually published just in May, and some of the presented issues have been developed, but the article still has its points of interest.
This article makes a good pair with the other one I published on “the January issue of Le Stelle”. The latter was actually written after the article published in May, and it approaches the issue of light pollution from a slightly different angle.
Following the first announcement a couple of days ago, here is the flyer prepared by our hosts (Consorzio Sistema Bibliotecario Nord Ovest Milano):