Illustrate, inform, bring closer: astronomy posters and models for the public visits in open days

The Outreach and Communication department at Instituto de Física de Cantabria (CSIC-Universidad de Cantabria, Spain) opens its doors to the scholars in a monthly basis, to show them our research lines and facilities. IFCA is also open for mentoring sessions with girls in STEM or for general public to commemorate special science-related days.

To Illustrate our activities and bring all these visitors closer to our lines of astronomy research, we have prepared several hand-made, analogical models like the mock-up of an X-ray space observatory and a black hole or the ©LEGO model of the Apollo 11 rocket.

These models are very useful to explain astronomy in a very simple way making science concepts more accessible and to make them more accessible. As a complementary, informative tool explaining the details of the models, we are developing a series of posters (in Spanish), easily readable in a non-expert language, as part of the permanent exhibition.

The posters are designed also to include gender perspective, highlighting the research of some women astronomers in the field related with the scientific concept.

We present here an initial set of three of these posters (in Spanish):

- the description of the black hole parts and some interesting facts about black holes.

- the current knowledge about active galaxies nuclei (AGN) as hosts of active black holes

- the details of the astronomy citizen science tool for galaxy classification CLAXSON (http://xmm-ssc.irap.omp.eu/claxson) that we use in our STEM activities and Master Class of Astrophysics (https://ifca.unican.es/es-es/educacion-y-divulgacion/clases-magistrales-de-astrofisica).

The English version of the individual posters can be found at http://xmm-ssc.irap.omp.eu/xmm2athena/posters/