Comments and anecdotes about the event:
The museum coordinated with the Hollins College Education Department for their pre-service Science teachers to present the NISE Net's toolkit activities. That left RVAS free to choose our own activities to conduct. And, it just so happened that we were developing a new outreach activity for our April 20th Astronomy Day and it needed beta testing. The idea for this new activity came to Ray during a webinar hosted by the Night Sky Network and presented by our friend, Dean Regas of Star Gazers fame. Dean's presentation was about software recently developed by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan [NAOJ] under their 4D2U project to present the latest astronomical data visually in four dimensions (three spatial and one temporal). This software, called Mitaka, runs on a Windows PC and contains a simple interface for navigating the universe in four dimensions at different distance scales and time-lapse speeds. RVAS members projected the planetarium-styled show through a Virtual Reality (VR) headset made by Yuneec and used for remote piloting of drones. For many visitors, this was their first time using a VR headset which we suspect was just as interesting as the virtual tour through space and time.