Our New Mexico Mars Society exhibition at the The Astronomy Day fair held at the Tiguex Park (across the Dinosaur Museum/Lodestar Planetarium ) was a great success.

The Astronomy Day 2003 was celebrated in Albuquerque, New Mexico with an exhibition from over 30 space groups including The National Space Society, Albuquerque Rocket Society, Albuquerque Astronomical Society, Rio Rancho Astronomical Society, Apache Point Observatory, the Lodestar Planetarium, Dark Skies Association, Starfire Optical Range among others.

Our group, The New Mexico Mars Society, had a big table featuring a 7 feet Mars Society Banner, posters, 100s of copies of various hand-outs including an article by Zubrin, Americas New Frontier and a multimedia PC with the Mars Direct presentation and many recent mars images. Fred from the National Space Society and Jerry for the New Mexico Rocket Society were also there. We had so much stuff that we needed two tables to put up everything we had. We were the only group to have a multimedia presentation. This presentation included hundreds of latest Mars images, a powerpoint presentation of The Case For Mars, and a multimedia "Ares 3" CD that the Mars Society had released a couple of years back. Unfortunately because of some technical problems we could only get the audio working and that was coupled with the Mars images that were automatically updating. The Ares 3 CD had a wonderful talk from Zubrin and other scientists about why we need to go to Mars. We also had some important books such as Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, and the Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin our founder on display. Here is a (slightly out of focus) photo of some of the material we had on display.

The audio and video attracted a lot of people. I believe we received more than 100 people at our table, among them probably more than half were kids - most of them really excited about Mars ! Fred and Jerry helped out with our Mars Society Table. Thank you guys for showing your support ! I decided to carry my home PC and the monitor with me instead of taking a lap-top since we had power-supply at the exhibition even though it was in a park, and the monitor that I had was 22 inch ! It also allowed me to have sustantial audio- even at maximum volume that his hard to bear in a room, the audio was just sufficient, mainly because of the large background noise of people talking around us. A laptop audio would have been usless without an amplifier. So that was one lesson - no point in a multimedia presentation for a big gathering unless you have a large enough audio and video to be visible in all the chaos.

I made this banner by combining multiple letter sized sheets printed out on an inkjet printer. The printout comes from a doc file which I created from scratch using the logo available from Mars Society combined with a special font "Decotura ICG" that comes with Office 2000 and that is very close to the font used by Mars Society. If you belong to another Mars Society chapter, please go ahead and use this doc file. I am giving it free. To download the word file click here. Note, if you do not have Microsoft Office 2000 or a newer version installed on your machine, the fonts may not come out correct. Make sure your Microsoft Word lists a font called "Decotura ICG". The file is such that you can combine the four pages by overlapping after printing it out on letter size sheets. The banner comes out approximately 7 feet long.

After printing the sheets out I mounted them on pink 1 inch thick polysterene sheet obtained from Home Depot- this foam is flexible and hard to break. After mounting the letters I covered the whole thing with transparent vinyl thus making the whole thing really permanent. This should last for our New Mexico chapter for the next few years ! Here is a photo of the banner from the exhibition -

The multi-media PC used for the presentation is my home PC with a 22 inch monitor and a digital sound card with bass woofer (see below). We had the Ares multimedia CD released by the Mars Society a couple of years back, along with the Mars Direct presentation and many recent mars images.

I had printed out approximately 50 copies each of two different games, and various hand-outs including an article by Zubrin, Americas New Frontier that can be seen on our exhibition table in the image below -

Here are all the photos from this exhibition. For the full resolution versions of these images click here.