In addition to these three major components, the Department is continually active in smaller scale outreach. Our planetarium is visited by outside groups and school classes with increasing frequency, now that a special fund has been set up for regular maintenance. These visits are still arranged on an ad hoc basis, requiring a volunteer grad student or faculty member to run the machine. We have held public open nights for years at the old observatory on the upper campus. An experimental proposal to be implemented soon is to move these to our main building, on the observing deck.
Individual faculty are active in a wide variety of public venues.
The only explicit monetary support for outreach in the department comes from private donations to project Astro, which support a half-time staff position. There are no State funds allocated for this purpose, and the consequent limit on staff support is the main limit on expanding our activities. We note that the Project Astro donations are by far the largest gifts to the department, funding a one-half FTE staff support position.