Using Science Museum Curator’s Knowledge to Create Astronomy Educational Content

The creation of astronomy educational content is sometimes a difficult task, especially in alternative learning environments such as a science museum. Many people visiting science museums have an interest in astronomy but are not specialists in this area. It should be interesting to find out if museum curators could make the knowledge that is present in museums more relevant to people's daily lives, thus making it easier to understand. General astronomy applications can yield really beautiful and precise sky images; however, the images are usually too complex to non-astronomy specialists or beginners. Therefore, it is difficult to use the applications' output images for educational purposes without spending a lot of time editing them. To solve this problem, the idea in this research study was to create an application that allows museum curators to apply the knowledge they already have through, and more quickly edit the images in an effort to make them more intelligible. After application developers worked with museum curators to develop and test such a system, the curators could create the educational content at least two times faster than they could using regular astronomy applications and image editors, and they were also able to easily create a content database and update the content.