Outreach

Pat Reiff is the director for a major project which developed an off-ramp for the information highway by "Creating the Public Connection", bringing real-time earth and space science data to museums and schools (originally sponsored by NASA's Digital Library Technology Program). Over ten million people have interacted with her exhibits and planetarium shows at the Houston Museum of Natural Science and other museums, and another five million with her web sites. Over 400,000 of her educational CD and DVD-Roms and planetarium videos have been distributed through her spinoff company spaceupdate.com. She has also been a leader in public education activities, including being director for four years for teacher education projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Eisenhower Foundation, in collaboration with Dr. Carolyn Sumners of the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS). Their latest collaboration is the creation and marketing of "Discovery Domes", portable digital theaters to teach earth and space science, with over 400 installations in 43 countries and 44 states, through her distribution company ePlanetarium.

She has produced or co-produced a number of full dome planetarium shows, including: Force 5, Earth's Wild Ride, Dinosaur Prophecy, Impact Earth, We Choose Space, Impact!, Great Planet Adventures, Apollo and Beyond, Magnetism, and Totality!, available to view on her YouTube Channel "eplanetarium". The shows are distributed by eplanetarium (http://eplanetarium.com/shows.php).

She organizes the reunions of the Space and Astronomy alumni, recently celebrating the 60th anniversary of the JFK "to the Moon" speech in the Rice stadium, with more than 6,000 people present, and a "Spelfie" taken of the group from space. She received a special recognition from the "SPACalumni" at their 2022 reunion.

She has guided many scientific tours, including total solar eclipse trips to Canada in 1979, Louisiana (annular), Mexico in 1991, Peru in 1994, the Caribbean in 1998, the Black Sea in 1999, Madagascar in 2001, Libya in 2006, China in 2008 and 2009, Tahiti in 2010, annular in May 2012, Australia in November 2012, transatlantic in November 2013, an Indonesian trip in 2016 and Wyoming in 2017. Eclipse trips to Chile in 2019 and Antarctica in 2021 were also be in conjunction with the Eclipse Tours, a spinoff of the JSC Astronomical Society. She works with the AAS in the planning for the 2023 and 2024 eclipses, with a new website TexasEclipse.net. She has taught thousands online and in person how to safely view the solar eclipse, and in 2017 gave away more than 35,000 eclipse glasses to teachers and the public.

She is the Regional Director for the "Citizen CATE" eclipse observation network, and recently traveled to Australia for the 2023 eclipse to test out the equipment and procedures.

Reiff in 2023 was awarded the "Excellence in Outreach" Award from the Wiess School of Natural Sciences.