On July 7, the Santiago Japanese School (with 44 students) held an annual lecture to celebrate TANABATA Festival, a Japanese star festival originating from the Chinese Qixi Festival to celebrate the meeting of the deities Orihime (Vega) and Hikoboshi (Altair) on the 7th day of the 7th month of the year. It was a sunny day, ideal for star festival.

This year’s lecture was given by Shin’ichiro Asayama, an associate professor at the NAOJ Chile Observatory. He started his lecture by showing a photo of night sky marking the location of Vega and Altair (photographed by Professor Seiji Kameno in Santiago) and explained the vastness of the universe to children. He went on to show the distance between Tokyo and Chile and expanded it gradually to the size of the Earth, the distance from the Earth to the moon and to the Sun, and the size of our galaxy using a four-dimensional digital universe viewer called MITAKA which is open to the public on the NAOJ website. Several analogies he used during the talk drew laughter from children. Students enjoyed a dynamic view of the universe with surprise and increased curiosity. We hope this will be a memorable experience as a closing event of the first semester for children who are waiting for winter vacation. [Text and photo provided by Takahiro Yamaguchi].