Scientists, artists, religious and cultural leaders have come together to create the Cosmology Gallery at the Gravity Discovery Centre (GDC) located 70 km north of Perth, Western Australia. The Cosmology Gallery exhibitions include the multicultural cosmology artworks, Celestial Visions astronomical photography exhibition and the Timeline of the Universe. The multicultural cosmology artworks are new artworks inspired by Australian Indigenous, Christian, Buddhist, Islamic, Hindu, scientific and technological perspectives of the universe. The Celestial Visions exhibition features astronomical events above famous landmarks, including Stonehenge and the Pyramids. The AUD 400,000+ project was funded by Lotterywest, Western Australia and the Cosmology Gallery was officially opened in July 2008 by the Premier of Western Australia.

Various ornamental shapes, such as the wheel, the rhombus, the broken cross, and the radiant triangle, which can be seen on popular costumes, domestic objects as well as in architecture, represent solar symbols with a clear apotropaic function whose origins may be detected on the Neolithic clay plates from Jevdet Nasr (Iraq), Knosos (Greece) and Tartaria (Romania). In the North-East of Romania the occurrence of such motifs is extremely frequent especially in traditional architecture. The Triple-Rayed Sun intersected by two lateral arcs is a remarkable adornment of this kind that seems to suggest the representation of an eclipse.

We present a 10 day-long astronomical discovery class for children from 10 up to 12 years old. “Classical” workshops dealing with constellations, sky maps, sundiala, rocket construction and launching, Sun and deep sky observations are proposed to children. In addition, we present our own workshops that can be achieved by children as research projects in a scientific, literary or in an artistic way. In this context, the rôle of astronomy is both educational and social for children. Scientific rudiments are passed on from scientific educators to pupils and from pupils to their families. Astronomy is an unifying science for everyone.

The TENPLA project (pronounced as “ten-pla”, like a famous Japanese food “Tempura”) is designed to communicate Astronomy with the public in Japan. We have been working to suggest various ways to enjoy astronomy. We have organised star gazing parties, science cafés, and lectures. We have made many goodies which make people interested in astronomy (e.g. “Astronomical Toilet Paper”). We have also provided opportunities to communicate with each other for people who have interests in such activities. In this paper we present a broad overview of the TENPLA project.

Modern planetaria achieved in 1923 a synthesis between planetaries and stellariums. In 2009, there are nearly 3000 planetariums all over the world, mainly in developed countries. We present here a brief historical and statistical analysis of this development.

The Antikythera Mechanism is the most sophisticated extant ancient astronomical instrument and analogue computer known and was assembled sometime between 150 and 100 BCE, almost a century after the death of Archimedes. The mechanism has a great educational potential as it appeals to inquiring minds as an astonishing artefact of science and technology. The latest research findings reveal significant cultural and social functions in its operations. This astonishing astronomical instrument has a clear interdisciplinary valueand it has that it may be used as an educational medium, to engage the general public, and especially to attract students both to/from exact sciences and to/from the humanities. The astronomical and technical knowledge embedded in the mechanism can also be used to introduce some aspects of modern science through the unknown technological achievements of Hellenic antiquity.

Many astronomical institutions have budgetary constraints that prevent them from spending large amounts on public outreach. This is especially true for smaller organizations, such as the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), where manpower and funding are at a premium. To maximize our impact, we employ unconventional and affordable outreach techniques that underscore our commitment to astronomy education and our local community. We participate in many unique community interactions, ranging from rodeo calf-dressing tournaments to art gallery exhibitions of CFHT images. Further, we have developed many creative methods to communicate complex astronomical concepts to both children and adults, including the use of a modified webcam to teach infrared astronomy and the production of online newsletter for parents, children, and educators. This presentation will discuss the outreach methods CFHT has found most effective in our local schools and our rural community.

2009 is important for Astronomy in Spain, not just because of the celebration of the International Year of Astronomy, but because of the beginning of the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS's operation. The Project ‘Consolider-Ingenio 2010: First Science with the GTC’, is a project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science & Innovation (MICINN). For this project, it is fundamental that the GTC, a complex and expensive installation, produces science from the very beginning. One of the project objectives is Public Outreach and, in this paper we explain the outreach and education plans around the first science with the GTC.

It is a great pleasure for me to open the IAU-UNESCO Symposium on The Role of Astronomy in Society and Culture which is taking place at the UNESCO Headquarters this week.

As an ancient and multidisciplinary field, astronomy is an ambassador for all sciences. Astronomy's broad appeal, whether from its cultural interest of our place in the universe, or its practical aims such as sea- or space navigation, is well recorded in history from ancient to modern times, and sky-awareness, more generally, began prehistorically. Astronomy's perceived role and purpose has continually developed over the ages. In all, astronomy is not to be viewed as a narrow subject operating in isolation but one that has contributed comprehensively to the advancement of society.

Humans have a need to understand where they fit in the cosmos. Driven by the unlimited possibilities of human imagination the night sky has been and is one of the most powerful stimulators of curiosity. In pre-modern times, farmers, pastoralists, travelers, even city dwellers unhampered by light pollution, had many opportunities to observe and wonder on the mysteries of the starry night. In this, the International Year of Astronomy marking the 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescopic observations (that is also the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin) there are many explorations using the advanced and expensive instruments that society provides for satisfying the public curiosity and, of course, that of the astronomers trained to ask and answer the questions. However, it is a truism that scientific answers always raise new questions that could not have been asked raised prior to the preceding answers. The more we know the more we know about what we do not know; the task of scientific inquiry, or, for that matter, inquiry in general, is endless.

In this talk I shall try to highlight some themes that seem to promise specially interesting progress in the coming decades. I can't claim to be much of a prophet myself, but I'd like to recall someone who was: Arthur C. Clarke. He lived in Sri Lanka, and died in 2007, aged 90. I'd like to discuss three issues that he would have found interesting: space and alien life; galaxies and their origin; and (more speculatively) the size of our universe.

Since this symposium commemorated Galileo's discoveries and was concerned with astronomy and culture, I thought I might examine the extent to which culture affects how we view, depict, and ultimately come to understand the Universe around us. Twenty-five years ago, Andrew Pickering, wrote Constructing Quarks – A Sociological History of Particle Physics, (Pickering 1984) a book that enormously annoyed the high-energy physics community, perhaps because it contained a disquieting dose of truth. Pickering argued that the theory of fundamental particles, the particles that make up the atomic nucleus, and break up or fuse into myriad other particles when smashed into each other, was a construct that physicist had pieced together, through a process he termed a “communally congenial representation of reality”. Physicists, he claimed, had arrived at a so-called “standard theory” of particle physics that was not an inherent description of Nature, but “deeply rooted in common-sense intuitions about the world and our knowledge of it”. Instead, Pickering surmised that a better depiction of particle physics would eventually be found, which would appear unrecognizably different from what had come to be the accepted way of viewing Nature's fundamental particles. Today, many particle physicists would be more likely to agree with Pickering than they were then. Although the standard theory has successfully survived a quarter of a century of testing, its scope is known to be limited. It fails to properly accommodate gravity. And the string theories, brane theories, and other attempts of particle physicists to produce a coherent theory of all the known forces of nature have so different a structure from the standard theory, topologically, as well as in terms of numbers of spatial dimensions, that they share little recognizable resemblance. So, we may ask, was Pickering right? Are physicists and astronomers just constructing congenial representations that bear little relation to the inherent structure of the Universe we inhabit? In astronomy, we have by now embraced what we term the “concordance model” based on general relativity, which we assert has led to tremendous strides in understanding the evolution of the Universe. But we find ourselves forced to postulate a new form of matter, dark matter, the existence of which is supported by little independent evidence, and we find ourselves forced to postulate the existence of a new form of energy, dark energy, for which there is similarly little independent evidence. Perhaps both these postulates will someday soon be justified. But we may equally well find a need for viewing the Universe in a totally different way that encompasses general relativity only as a limiting case, but embraces dark matter and dark energy as a natural consequence. Such a depiction might then be just as mind-bogglingly different from what we conceive today, as Einstein's postulate was, when he first annunciated it, that the speed of light would always appear the same no matter how fast an observer was moving toward or away from its source. How could that be, it violated every conceivable human intuition?

Cosmological discoveries over the past century have completely changed our picture of our place in the universe. New observations have a realistic chance of probing nature on heretofore unimaginable scales, and as a result are changing the nature of fundamental science. Perhaps no other domain of science has an equal capacity to completely change our perspective of the world in which we live.

The traditional cultures of Aboriginal Australians include a significant astronomical component, which is usually reported in terms of songs or stories associated with stars and constellations. Here we argue that the astronomical components extend further, and include a search for meaning in the sky, beyond simply mirroring the earth-bound understanding. In particular, we have found that traditional Aboriginal cultures include a deep understanding of the motion of objects in the sky, and that this knowledge was used for practical purposes such as constructing calendars. We also present evidence that traditional Aboriginal Australians made careful records and measurements of cyclical phenomena, and paid careful attention to unexpected phenomena such as eclipses and meteorite impacts.

Indigenous, endogenous, traditional, or cultural astronomy focuses on the many ways that people and cultures interact with celestial bodies. In most parts of Africa, there is very little or no awareness about modern astronomy. However, like ancient people everywhere, Africans wondered at the sky and struggled to make sense of it. The African Cultural Astronomy Project aims to unearth the body of traditional knowledge of astronomy possessed by peoples of the different ethnic groups in Africa and to consider scientific interpretations when appropriate for cosmogonies and ancient astronomical practices. Regardless of scientific validity, every scientist can relate to the process of making observations and creating theoretical mechanisms for explaining what is observed. Through linking the traditional and the scientific, it is believed that this would be used to create awareness and interest in astronomy in most parts of Africa. This paper discusses the vision, challenges and prospects of the African Cultural Astronomy Project in her quest to popularize astronomy in Africa.

Human beings are born astronomers. Ever since they learnt to walk upright they have looked at the sky and wondered. The sky has remained the same but not its meaning. We can distinguish between three phases in the history of humankind's relationship with its cosmic environment: (i) propitiatory phase; (ii) negotiatory phase; and the current (iii) sky-as-an-object explanatory, phase. My concern here is to discuss the interplay between astronomy and culture in general in the Indian context. Much of the discussion belongs to the negotiatory phase. More specifically I discuss how in the formative era, sacred texts influenced astronomy, how these texts themselves were modified under the influence of new scientific developments, and how mythology was upgraded to keep pace with science.

Babylonian astronomy is quite different from astronomy as it is customary today. We have to reconstruct it exclusively from texts and a few schematic drawings accompanying them. No instruments related to astronomy have been found. These texts are written on clay tablets in cuneiform script which was used in the Near East from ca. 3000 BCE to 100. It was completely forgotten and only deciphered in the middle of the 19th century. Since then, hundreds of thousands of clay tablets have been found in archaeological excavations, mostly in present-day Iraq. Among these are a few thousand tablets related to astronomy. Many have been published, but more still need to be worked on. And of course an unknown number of such texts is still buried under the sands of Iraq.

Over the past five years, the Egyptian-Spanish Mission on the archaeoastronomy of ancient Egypt and its collaborators has been performing an ambitious scientific project with the aim of studying the cosmovision of the ancient civilization of the pharaohs. Part of the project has consisted of a re-analysis of the iconographic and historical sources that has allowed, among other things, a reassessment of the calendar theory and a new proposal for the sky-maps of ancient Egypt. For various reasons, Archaeoastronomy has not been one of the favourite disciplines of egyptologists in the past. Probably because of this, important questions such as the orientation of Egyptian temples and the relevance of astronomy in this respect had never been afforded with the requisite seriousness and depth. Our work has had among its various priorities, the solution of this problem. In order to achieve this, our team has so far measured the orientation of some 330 temples in the Valley, the Delta, the Oases and the Sinai. The aim is to find a correct and almost definitive answer to the question of whether the ancient Egyptian sacred constructions were astronomically aligned or not. Our results may provide an affirmative answer.

The observation of the sky had an important rôle among the Maya, Aztecs and other prehispanic peoples of Mesoamerica. Their familiarity with the regularities of the apparent motion of the Sun, the Moon and bright planets is attested in a large amount of astronomical data contained in codices and monumental hieroglyphic inscriptions, as well as in their sophisticated calendrical system. On the other hand, the study of architectural alignments has disclosed that civic and ceremonial buildings were largely oriented on astronomical grounds, mostly to sunrises and sunsets on certain dates, allowing the use of observational calendars that facilitated a proper scheduling of agricultural and the associated ritual activities in the yearly cycle. Both accurate knowledge and other astronomically-derived concepts reveal that the significance attributed to certain celestial events by the ancient Mesoamericans can be explained in terms of the relationship of these phenomena with specific environmental and cultural facts, such as seasonal climatic changes and subsistence strategies. It was particularly due to its practical utility that astronomy, intertwined with religious ideas and practices, had such an important place in the worldview and, consequently, in the cosmologically substantiated political ideology of Mesoamerican societies