About the author

This website is maintained by Josie Floyd. I live and work in Canberra, Australia.

The author (Josie Floyd) with two different views of the planetarium I created in 2015. It is Canberra’s only planetarium.

Employment

I am employed as a teacher in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. My past roles have included working for six years as a primary school STEM specialist teacher and as a Curriculum officer in my employer’s central office. When working as a STEM specialist at Giralang Primary School, I visited other schools with Canberra’s only planetarium. The large inflatable silver 5 metre diameter igloo behind me in the above picture fits 30 primary age students and contains an all-dome video projection system.

The author at the presentation night for the 2018 Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science on 17 October 2018.

My professional contributions in the Science/STEM fields were recognised in 2018 when I was nominated for, and shortlisted for the 2018 The Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching (Primary Schools).

April 2012: I have just finished a simulated walk on Mars at the Victorian Space Science Education Centre.
I have just finished a simulated walk on Mars at the Victorian Space Science Education Centre. April 2012. I wrote about my experience at the Centre here online.

World Wide Web Outreach

As of January 2024, I have been providing astronomy information via the WWW for twenty seven years. This website was originally established in January 1997 to provide astronomy information to schools I visited through a business called Southern Star Education. The website (originally hosted at www.ozskywatch.com) was rated 9/10 by New Scientist magazine in November 2002. The site was moved to its current URL in October 2008.

In March 2015, this site was archived by Pandora (Australia’s web archive). This occurred thanks to the State Library of Queensland nominating the site as a Queensland ‘website of lasting significance’. This is particularly exciting for me as I feel it is recognition for the effort that I have put into creating original content to go on the site. It means that the educational resources I have created will be freely available to schools and community groups into the indefinite future (and long after I cease paying to host the site!).

Other Astronomy Education Activities

For six years and a half years, I operated an education service in South East Queensland (trading as Southern Star Education – now closed) providing portable planetarium programmes to over 31,000 school and adult participants (1993 – 2000). The service visited schools from the Gold Coast through Brisbane through to the Sunshine Coast. As part of my promotional activities for this now closed business, I initiated the running of Australia’s first astronomy education conference (in conjunction with the Brisbane Astronomical Society) targeting primary and secondary teachers in 1994. This conference eventually became the Queensland Astronomy Education Conference and was convened seven times between 1994 and 2012. An article summarising the 1994 – 2012 history of  the Queensland Astronomy Education Conference can be downloaded here: QAEC_article (PDF file format).

Contact details

Note that you are able to make a comment directly on each blog page.

Mobile: (+) 040 888 4380

Email: josie.floyd@nightskyonline.info

Copyright information

This website has been created by Josie Floyd from material produced by a variety of organisations and individuals as well as original material produced by Josie Floyd.

Material produced by organisations and individuals are clearly labelled as such. In some cases, some material has been released into the public domain and that organisation retains no copyright over that material (NASA is the prime example of this). Please contact me if I am incorrectly displaying material on this site and/or without the original authors permission, and I will remove it if required.

I am slowly adding a range of educational resources to my website. The majority of this material is being published under a Creative Commons licence which allows it to be freely reproduced in its entirety for non-commercial purposes. If that material is not labelled with a Creative Commons symbol and licence information, then it may not be reproduced without explicit written permission from me.

Disclaimer

Unless otherwise stated, the views represented on this site are those of the author (Josie Floyd) only. They do not represent the views of my current employer.

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