This review of Aboriginal astronomy and navigation brings together accounts from widely dispersed places in Western Australia, from Noongar Country in the south-west, through to the Eastern Goldfields, the Pilbara, the Kimberley and the Central Deserts. Information for this review has been taken from the literature and non-conventional sources, including artist statements of paintings. The intention for the review is that the scope is traditional, pre-European settlement understandings, but post-settlement records of oral accounts, and later articulation by Aboriginal peoples, are necessarily relied upon. In large part, the Western Australian accounts reflect understandings reported for other states. For example, star maps were used for teaching routes on the ground, but available accounts do not evidence that star maps were used in real-time navigation. The narratives or dreamings that differ most from those of other states explain creation of night-sky objects and landforms on Earth, events including thunder, or they address social behaviour.

Sunspot observations, normally made with small telescopes during the last four centuries, should be considered a world heritage for many reasons including purely scientific aspects and other cultural and social reasons. Here, these aspects are briefly reviewed.

When we talk about Astronomy, we normally do not take into account that we are using a cultural specific way of understanding the sky. Astronomers, either professional, amateur or just lovers of the sky nowadays tend to approach the sky from the point of view of modern science. There, we approach the sky as something that needs to be explored, understood and explained.

However, this vision was not always like that, or even in other cultures is/was completely different. For centuries, the human being has comprehended the sky, its changes and constancies, as part of their world, as part of the environment, as part of their everyday life.

In this paper, I review a few of these different ways of approaching the sky in several cultures, from the Near East to Rome or the Andes and how we can use them today for education, outreach and heritage management.

Cultural astronomy is the study of the astronomy of ancient cultures and is sometimes called the anthropology of astronomy. The many ways that astronomy was used by ancient cultures are fascinating and this can be used to inspire interest in all astronomy, as well as astronomy in culture. Archaeoastronomy is interdisciplinary and among its practitioners are not only astronomers and astrophysicists, but also anthropologists, archaeologists, and Indigenous scholars. Much can be learned about ancient cultures though examination of how and why they used astronomy. This paper will highlight several examples that can capture public attention.

The language we speak, the culture in which we grew up and where we come from have a tremendous impact on the way we learn astronomy. Additionally, the historical predominance of Western culture has influenced the way our modern society sees the world, and of course, the sky. In this work, we will share author’s experience working as science advisor in an outreach institution, where he explored different strategies to reach diverse communities and bring astronomy closer to broader audiences.

Even though the construction of world-renowned astronomical observatories in Chile has boosted the interest in astronomy on the community, many challenges have not yet been addressed. One of them is to raise awareness about the ancestral heritage of Chilean’s first nations. Finally, we would like to highlight the importance of learning astronomy in our own language and therefore assure inclusion, diversity, and equity in our countries.

We present the data related to the revealed astronomical oldest observatories at the territory of Ukraine and describe briefly the principles of observations which could be realized at these sites with usage of megalithic stones. Among these oldest observatories are as follows: the stone complex at the Lysyna Kosmatska mountain (Charpatian region); Bakhchysaray Menhir in Crimea; a complex of shafts at the Mavrin Maidan near Pavlograd city.

In the past, Western academic astronomy has conceived in a very specific way its interests. However, in recent decades there has been a promising openness to the rest of the society, in the context of areas such as education, heritage and outreach. Despite this, there has not been an adequate scientific approach to do it, which would imply taking into account the social sciences and a truly interdisciplinary perspective. Here we want to develop the idea that this interdisciplinary approach already exists and it is called: Cultural Astronomy. Unfortunately, in the context of academic astronomy it has been only seen as a study of the “astronomies of others”, intended as previous stages or failed attempts of Western academic astronomy. We will seek to show that Cultural Astronomy, as a critical reflection on the social character of the astronomical knowledge, is key to the success of these opening efforts.

The US astronomy/astrophysics community comes together to create a decadal report that summarizes grant funding priorities, observatory & instrumental priorities as well as community accomplishments and community goals such as increasing the number of women and the number of people from underrepresented groups. In the 2010 US National Academies Decadal Survey of Astronomy (NRC10), it was suggested that having to move so frequently which is a career necessity may be unattractive to people wanting to start a family, especially impacting women. Whether in Europe or elsewhere, as postdocs, astrophysicists will relocate every two to three years, until they secure a permanent position or leave research altogether. Astrophysicists do perceive working abroad as important and positive for their careers (Parenti02); however, it was found that the men at equal rank had not had to spend as much time abroad to further their careers (Fohl12). By implication, women need to work abroad longer or have more positions abroad to achieve the same rank as men. Astrophysicists living in the United Kingdom prefer to work in their country of origin, but many did not do so because of worse working conditions or difficultly finding a job for their spouse (Fohl14). In sum, mobility and moving is necessary for a career in astrophysics, and even more necessary for women, but astrophysicists prefer not to move as frequently as needed to maintain a research career. To gather more data on these issues and to broaden the discourse beyond male/female to include the gender diverse as well as to include other forms of diversity, the ASTROMOVES project was created which is funded through a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship. Though slowed down by COVID-19, several interviews have been conducted and some preliminary results will be presented.

Over the past decade the free and open-source cross-platform desktop planetarium program Stellarium has gained not only most of the computational accuracy requirements for today’s amateur astronomers, but also unique capabilities for specialized applications in cultural astronomy research and astronomical outreach. A 3D rendering module can put virtual reconstructions of human-made monuments in their surrounding landscape under the day and night skies of their respective epochs, so that the user can investigate and experience the potential connection of architecture, landscape, light and shadow, and the sky. It also played a key role in an exhibition about Stonehenge in Austria.

Exchangeable “skycultures” allow the presentation of constellation patterns and mythological figures of non-Western cultures. Stellarium’s multi-language support allows community-driven translation of the whole program, which predestines its use in education also in minority languages.

Stellarium is developed by a very small core team, but is open to external contributions.

Gufa, one of the traditional rituals, has been performed in Nepal since time immemorial by indigenous Newar people. In Gufa, a young girl who just had her first period is hidden in a sunless room for twelve consecutive days. This paper expounds the importance of ritual and its nexus with astronomy especially while interpreting how the daily motions of celestial objects have influenced the establishment and devolvement of a deep-rooted custom of Gufa.

In this paper we report on a 15-year project to construct a comprehensive catalogue of Hawaiian starnames documented in historical sources, published during the IAU General Assembly. Hawaiian star knowledge represents incomparable intangible heritage relating to Polynesian navigation in the Pacific. It both informs and motivates living cultural traditions aiming to reconstruct and build upon such knowledge.

Astronomy is part of our culture. Astronomy cannot be isolated in a classroom, it has to be integrated in the normal life of teachers and students. “Astronomy in the city” is an important part of NASE (Network for Astronomy School Education) (Ros & Hemenway 2012). In each NASE course we introduce a “working group session” chaired by a local expert in cultural astronomy. The chair introduces several examples of astronomy in their city and after that, the participants have the opportunity to discuss and mention several similar examples. After this session all participants visit one or two sites proposed and introduced by the chair.

After more than 5 years using this method we visited and discovered several examples of astronomy in the city:

•Astronomy in ancient typical clothes.

•Archaeological temples oriented according to the sunrise or set.

•Petroglyphs with astronomical meaning.

•Astronomy in monuments.

•Sundials.

•Oriented Colonial churches.

•Astronomy in Souvenirs.

In any case, teachers and students discover that Astronomy is part of their everyday life. They can take into account the Sun's path when they park their car or when they take a bus “what is the best part in order to be seat in the shadow during the journey?” The result is motivation to go with “open eyes” when they are in the street and they try to get more and more information about their surroundings.

In summary, one of the main activities is to introduce local cultural aspects in NASE astronomy courses. The participants can discover a new approach to local culture from an astronomical point of view.

Human beings have recognized and interpreted celestial objects and events since time immemorial. The sky, our common and universal heritage, forms an integral part of all human cultures around the world. The Ancient Skies Project aims to collect, verify and publish available information about various human cultures and their astronomical knowledge in one single web-accessible knowledgebase.

The overall vision for the project is

In this paper we describe the basic tenets of the project, discuss the design of the knowledgebase, and compare the project to other similar projects.

Like other features of the surrounding world, objects and events perceived in the sky were used to mediate between humans and specific meanings acquired in relation to them. Celestial bodies were often believed to act like human agents. In this way the skies became part of the social field of human beings—a heterogeneous space in which all important types of relationships could happen. For this reason, the study of the role celestial lore and skywatching played in human populations is a task appropriate to cultural astronomers rather than to astrophysicists or historians of science.

The megalithic monuments of Arles–Fontvieille appear to have been deliberately constructed such that a ray of the setting sun on and around the equinox penetrates the subterranean chamber producing a spectacular light-and-shadow hierophany. Moreover, at one of the sites there is evidence in the form of rock art that observations were also being made of heliacal rising and settings, possibly of both the Pleiades and Orion. The equinox hierophany has been documented at three of the four intact monuments of the group. This phenomenon was probably exploited for sacred ritualistic purposes related to seasonal change and timekeeping by the agricultural people who built the monuments. This evidence has significant importance for understanding these monuments in the context of European megalithism and the wider European Neolithic as well as for understanding their cosmological role within the society that built them.

This personal perspective on the development of archaeoastronomy over the last thirty years focuses on interpretative and methodological issues, picking up for example from the debate between Schaefer and Aveni at Oxford VII. How far we have actually progressed in the last three decades? Are we at last starting to achieve the correct fusion between the social science questions that our discipline addresses and the ‘hard science’ methods that are often involved in tackling them? In this paper I argue that the need for our hypotheses to be solidly grounded in social theory, which has rightly been recognised by most archaeoastronomers in recent years, is not an excuse for avoiding the need to be scientifically rigorous in assessing them against the actual evidence. I conclude that identifying robust methodologies for weighing together the different types of data with which the cultural astronomer is faced in different sitations, so as to infer the ‘best’ interpretation, remains at once the most challenging and the most pressing issue facing our ‘interdiscipline’ in the future.

Legacy documentation, the accumulated historical knowledge about an archaeological site, must be reviewed in order to locate data on the condition of archaeological features and architecture proposed to be related to astronomical observances. This type of documentation can be located in museums, research libraries, colleges or universities, national public institutions and increasingly in digitized collections available on the internet. Locating and using legacy documentation is more than a simple review of literature. It is an integral part of the process of architectural documentation. The method of architectural documentation involves detailed site proveniencing, obtaining summary data for study units, and detailed descriptions of feature conditions (Nordby et al. 2002). Case studies present the impact of legacy documentation when evaluating the original condition of astronomically associated architecture or features.

In this paper, we present a study about cultural astronomy among European colonists who settled in the northern area of the Argentinean province of Santa Fe, which is part of the southern Chaco. These colonists arrived among waves of immigration occurring in Argentina in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. Ethnographic field research among these rural immigrants and their descendants revealed that a set of asterisms were distributed according to the origins of the different European communities and also according to their uses in agriculture, animal husbandry and meteorology.

A brief discussion is given on the possible contributions of the schools of architecture to the safeguard of important monuments of astronomical interest. Some highlights of a meeting dedicated to the italian astronomical cultural heritage are also reported.