Edward Gomez

Co-author: Alice Hopkinson
My aim for this talk is to show how to scale education programmes and make them sustainable. I will use the Global Sky Partners as a case study. The Global Sky Partners is the flagship educational project from Las Cumbres Observatory. It addresses the key question of how to run an efficient and sustainable education programme in astronomy. Las Cumbres Observatory is a homogeneous network of 25 telescopes, across 7 professional observatory sites. They do not operate in the same manner as a traditional observatory, as observations are queue scheduled with an algorithm deciding which observatory takes the data. We wanted to use this network effectively without needing to expand the education support team. Global Sky Partners was the answer. In this talk I will discuss how having calling for proposals for educational projects to use telescope time, and working with education delivery partners across the globe, impacted 100,000 individuals in 2022. A core audience for this programme are disadvantaged or underrepresented communities, which in 2022 represented over 58% of the users.