Category: outreach

Well, I’m pretty speechless.

When I first started delivering virtual planetarium shows to Brownie groups back in the lockdown of January 2021, I never expected how popular they would be.   Seventy shows and more than 1400 girls later, I’m still getting requests.  Not at the level I did during the pandemic, since groups have returned to meeting in-person, but I’m still delivering shows to groups (and schools!) I could never visit physically because of the distance, and having a lot of fun doing it.

I’m astonished to say that in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list published today I have been awarded the British Empire Medal for services to Girlguiding during the Covid-19 pandemic, in recognition of my efforts to help girls earn their Space interest badges during the pandemic, and for being a role model showing girls that science is fun and that they can be scientists if they want to be.

I don’t know who it was that nominated me for this, but a HUGE thank you to whoever it was!  It is always a real pleasure to talk with enthusiastic groups about astronomy and share my passion with them, and that is a brilliant reward in itself.  The questions asked by all the Rainbows, Brownies, Guides and Rangers I have spoken to over the last year and a half have been brilliant, and it’s been such fun answering them all!

If you want a show for your class or group, just fill in the form here – all you need is a laptop, projector, and a wall or screen to project me on to!

As I said in an earlier post, I’ve been offering free virtual planetarium shows via Zoom to Brownie and Guide groups around the UK since January 2021.  This all started when a friend of mine (a daughter of my old Guide leader) asked if I could do something for her Brownie group – I’d visited them in person before and taken a telescope, getting all the Brownies through their space badge in one evening.

I figured that a virtual planetarium show using Stellarium would work pretty well over Zoom, so on a cold January evening I joined their meeting and took them on a tour of the evening sky, told them the story of Andromeda and Perseus, and then we visited some of the planets.  They asked a lot of questions!  The evening was such a success that I decided to offer it to other groups during lockdown.  One Facebook post later and I was absolutely swamped with requests!  I’ve been doing shows ever since.

It’s now eight months on, and as we pass the end of another term and groups have broken up for the summer, it’s a good time to look back and take stock.

From that first event, the idea developed into one of the most successful public engagement projects I’ve ever run.  With a budget of £0, and the help of three of my colleagues I had to draft in to help me cope with the volume of requests, we’ve managed to reach over 1,200 girls around the country, through 60 individual shows, from Portsmouth to Clackmannanshire, Caernarfonshire to Yorkshire, and everywhere in between.

At UCLan we have an Observatory where we teach undergraduate astrophysics classes, but we also host public events for families, youth groups, and the general public.  We get a lot of Scout and Cub groups coming along, but very rarely do we get any Guide or Brownie groups visiting, despite the Brownies having a recently revamped Space badge in the programme.  It’s not hard to see why this is; girls are often perceived as being less interested in this sort of thing, and maybe it’s not something the leaders think of doing with the girls.

But my experience over the last few months is that Brownies absolutely love space!  In fact, my experience with hundreds of schools and youth groups across the UK and Australia over the last 18 years (since I started doing public engagement during my PhD studies…) is that most children love space, at least to some extent.  Space and dinosaurs.  And I love answering their questions.  Even when science hasn’t found the answer yet!  (That’s half the fun of science, after all!)

I’m not aiming to create a huge number of budding astrophysicists, or even scientists – that is unrealistic – but if I can inspire just a few kids to take an interest in science, maybe develop an appreciation for it and keep being curious about the world around them as they grow up, then I will have achieved something.

If you are reading this and want a virtual visit for your group from September 2021, here’s the booking form.  Best efforts though, I only have so many free evenings ☺️

During lockdown I started offering free virtual planetarium shows to any Brownie group (or Cub group!) that wants one, as long as I have a free evening and can fit you in.  These have proved so popular that I’ve had to draft in some colleagues from the astronomy group at the University of Central Lancashire to help!

In a half-hour show the Brownies will discover what is visible in the sky right now, we’ll look at some of the constellations, they will hear some of the stories behind of the constellations, we will take a quick tour of the planets to see them up close, and the girls can ask the presenter any space-related questions they have.

No special software is needed, the presenter will just share their screen so everyone can see our virtual planetarium!

If you would like to book a (free!) session for your Brownie unit, please fill in the booking form and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

UPDATE: Feb 12th – these have been so popular that I’m now booked up until Easter!  If you would like a show, please fill in the form anyway and I will add your details to the waiting list.  Some of my colleagues are also delivering shows, and I’ll start booking more slots after Easter soon.

UPDATE: April 22nd – I’m now completely booked up until the end of term, so I have had to close the booking form.  Thanks for your interest in a planetarium show, if we end up back under restrictions I will re-open booking.

At Manchester Science Festival in 2016 I teamed up with artist and graphic designer Nick Sayers to run cycling tours of the solar system – from the Sun to Neptune – along a 4.5-km section of the Fallowfield Loop cycle path in Manchester.  The weekend was a great success, with all tours fully-booked, and lots of really enthusiastic cycling-astronauts of all ages.  So when I saw a call for projects at the Story Of Space festival in India, it seemed like a good idea to pitch the project.

Cycle the Solar System – on a scale of 1:1 billion. Credit: Nick Sayers

The Story Of Space was organised by a team from The Story Of foundation, who put in huge amounts of effort to secure funding, sponsorship, volunteers to support the festival projects, and all manner of other things, all in addition to their “normal” jobs.  The festival ran from November 10th to 19th 2017 across several locations in and around the city of Panjim in Goa, India, and everything in the festival programme was completely free to attend.  November 2017 saw a huge number of artists and scientists converging on Panjim to create numerous installations, and Cycle the Solar System was one of the proposals selected to be part of the festival!

Cycle the Solar System goes to Goa

Cycling in Manchester is something of a risky business.  I lived in the city for six years and did a lot of cycling; it is great to see today that more cycle paths are being constructed, but it still feels something of a risk heading out on the roads.  Despite this, nothing quite prepared me for the “excitement” of cycling in India at rush hour.  (If you’re into extreme sports and adrenaline, give it a go.)  Despite the buses, cows, trucks, scooters, deep gutters, hidden wheel-sized holes, trees in the road (etc), we didn’t loose a single astronaut!

Over ten days we ran eight tours of the solar system on a scale of 1:1 billion, each running over 4.5 kilometres starting from the Entertainment Society of Goa, past the Sun at the malaria centre, the inner planets alongside Luis Gomes park, Jupiter near Campal Ground, Saturn near Miramar circle, Uranus south of Goa Science Centre, to Neptune (appropriately) at a fish market just short of Dona Paula jetty.  The route ran along a main road so, as the astronomer tour guide, I spent the best part of three hours talking over traffic.  Combined with the dust and the air pollution, I almost lost my voice, but not quite.

The vast choice of fruit and vegetables available at Panjim market

Along the route we stopped at the Sun, each of the eight planets, as well as the asteroid belt, and in the outer solar system for ice cream comets.  To aid with the sense of scale, our model included flags with images of each planet (at the correct scale), as well as locally-sourced (mostly-) edible props to make it more memorable.  In our model, the Sun was a stripy golf umbrella, Mercury was a peppercorn, Venus and Earth were represented by whole nutmegs, Mars was a dried chickpea, Jupiter was a green coconut, Saturn was a regular coconut with a frisbee for the rings, and Uranus and Neptune were a local root vegetable that we never actually found out how to cook!  To get props that were the right scale we spent a morning at Panjim municipal market, measuring all the fruit and veg with a tape measure… the stallholders were thoroughly confused by the eccentric English people and their odd habits.  “It’s ok, it’s for science!” didn’t quite have the reassuring effect we had hoped!

Miniature solar system bracelet and UV-beads.

As well as the scale-model props, I also added a miniature solar system scale model in the form of a bracelet made by Emma Wride of AstroCymru, which was useful for giving an impression of the distances between the planets before we set off on the bikes.  I also made use of some UV-beads from Helen Mason, illustrating (along with our rainbow-coloured umbrella representing the Sun) that the Sun emits radiation in parts of the spectrum that our eyes just cannot see – for some of our interplanetary astronauts, this was the first time they had come across this concept.

Exploring the solar system with kids of all ages

The days were long, the traffic was scary, but it was all worth it.  The groups that came on the tour were all different, from an international school in South Goa, people from AFA, the local astronomical society, to local college students, families, and adults from all sorts of backgrounds, so each tour had its own unique character.  Everyone went home happy though, having gained an impression of the immense scale of our solar system and the huge distances between the planets, relating the distances to memorable local landmarks.  As the tour guide, I tried to present a few interesting facts about each planet, but each tour was largely driven by the questions from the audience; people can get as many facts as they like from books (or wikipedia), but the shear scale of the distance between the planets is something that is much more difficult to comprehend, and that – for me – was the main point of the tour.

As a scientist at a (mainly) arts festival, I found myself among a very creative and open-minded group of people.  As a scientist I found this refreshing, and as a science communicator I found it inspiring.  The more I talked with the artists at the festival, the more we found we had in common.  These crossover conversations culminated in a panel session on art-science collaborations, where five of us enjoyed debating how and why these kinds of projects work in front of an audience at the Goa Science Centre.

Cycle the Solar System goes to the Miramar Circle food market!

The world of science is phenomenally exciting:  doing good science requires much more creativity than most people realise, and communicating science is an inherently creative endeavour.  I left Panjim with many new ideas that I look forward to trying out and using in my own work, I hope everyone else (scientists, artists, and visitors) went home similarly inspired.  Huge thanks to The Story Of Foundation for making it all happen, to our amazing helpers (particularly Namrata and Sejal!) and to the RAS and OAD for funding my participation.

After meeting Professor Jamal Mimouni at the CAP conference in Medellin back in May, I recently had the great pleasure of hosting both him and the winners of the Algerian national Cirta Science competition during their astronomical tour of the UK.  The group included the winning students, members of the Sirius Astronomy Association, as well Jamal and another physics professor.  They spent a day at Jodrell Bank learning about the telescopes and the science we can do with them, and visiting the offices of the Square Kilometre Array project. They were a really lovely group of people with lots of excellent questions about astronomy, and life as a scientist.  For me, it was a really enjoyable afternoon talking to genuinely-interested (and interesting!) people.  I hope they enjoyed the experience as much as I did!

Visit to Jodrell Bank of the Sirius Astronomy Association and the winners of the Cirta Science competition from Algeria. Top: exploring how interferometers work.  Bottom: looking at the structure of the Lovell telecsope. Credit: Prof. Jamal Mimouni.