March 29, 2021 7:30-9:30PM

Event: Astronomy on Tap, Mandarin Edition

Talk 1

Title:
Lecturer: Quanzhi Ye
Position: Staff Astronomer
Institution: University of Maryland

Talk 2

Title:
Lecturer: Cheng Zhang
Position: PhD Candidate
Institution: Caltech

Quiz Questions / Answers

Lots of lessons learned on this one.
We advertised through our normal channels: YouTube, Caltech calendar, Astronomy on Tap website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
But many of these sites are blocked in mainland China, so we sought to advertise through more standard ways within China.
Unfortunately, registering accounts with some of these services requires a Chinese phone number or Chinese IP!
Yuguang and Cameron eventually succeeded in making a WeChat personal account tied to Cameron's phone, which allowed
us to register to Weibo and Bilibili. Then we had to jump through some hoops to make an "official" Caltech Astro account on Bilibili
by getting an authorization letter from someone in the administration, Allison Benter, Director of Digital Communications in the Office
of Strategic Communications. Yuguang had a connection at Bilibili which helped us get this through, but they still weren't going to
let us broadcast live on their service, because we weren't coming from an IP inside China.
In all of the posts in our social media locations, we put the Chinese text first and foremost and then put English underneath, since
that is our primary audience. While we got lackluster response in our english-speaking social media outlets, we've gotten a lot of
interest through our chinese-language social media outlets. Here is our Weibo post: https://m.weibo.cn/status/4617848690837180
Here is a post on Douban: https://www.douban.com/group/topic/216916600/
Additionally, we were contacted by the Caltech Office of Associates (e.g., donors), and they are trying to make an entry into
the chinese-speaking audience, so they offered to advertise our event to their people.