Astrophysicist

Tag: art

Ever wanted to design a space patch?

After all the fun with the planetarium shows, a couple of us at UCLan hatched a plan to ask kids to help us design a new Space Badge for Alston Observatory.  We get a lot of Cub and Scout groups visiting the Observatory, but far fewer groups of Brownies or Guides.  Cubs and Scouts have Astronomer badges, and Brownies have a Space badge, but Guides don’t (sadly).  But, everyone loves a good badge for their backpack/camp blanket/whatever!  So, we’re asking people between the ages of five and sixteen to get creative and help us design a new Space patch that we will get made up and give out to young visitors to our Observatory.  Know someone creative in the right age group?  Ask them to get their pencils out!  Hurry though, entries close on October 31st.

University of Central Lancashire

Calling all space fans aged 5-16 years old!

Use your artistic skills to design a space badge – from stars to planets, telescopes to extra-terrestrial life, create your design to inspire future space explorers.

The winning designs will be given out to Alston Observatory visitors.

The winner will receive a £30 Amazon voucher and there are books for the runners-up.

Competition closes 31 October 2021.

Ask your parent / guardian to review the full T&C’s.

Download an entry form

University events are returning including the Lancashire Science Festival

Lancashire Science Festival

Best wishes,
The Lancashire Science Festival Team
University of Central Lancashire

@alstonobsy
@LancSciFest
#LancSciFest / LancSciFest

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Barnaby: art meets science in Macclesfield

These days, Macclesfield is a much more lively town than I remember from my childhood. One (large) reason for this is the Barnaby Festival, a volunteer-run town festival that fills the town with arts and music. This year had a bit of a twist: the theme was SPACE! In all the meanings of the word, not just astronomical. I had the great pleasure of helping to plan this year’s festival as part of the live events team, and it’s been amazing.

One of the events I ended up working on was the Deep Space Lab, a collection of displays, activities and talks in the town hall running all day on Saturday and Sunday June 18-19th. For two days (apart from when I ran out to play with the samba band in the parade!), I ran the live observing part of the Deep Space Lab. Over the weekend we used telescopes run by the brilliant people at LCOGT (in Hawaii and Siding Spring, Australia) to observe a selection of astronomical objects in real time, watching the images coming in direct from the telescope in real time.  Despite the rather large cloud bank sitting over eastern Australia for pretty much the entire weekend, the weather in Hawaii wasn’t half bad and we got some pretty stunning images.

The best of the images from the weekend are shown below.  Astronomical colour images are usually made up of separate grey-scale images taken through different narrow-band filters which only let through particular colours of light.  Most of the images taken during the Deep Space Lab were through red, green and blue filters, resulting in full-colour images like the one you see below.  Astronomy is all about understanding the physics (and chemistry) of the universe using just the photons that reach us on the Earth – that is all the information we have, just the photons, so the more of them we collect, across as much of the spectrum as possible, the better we can understand what’s going on out there in all those stellar clusters, star-forming regions, and galaxies that we see.  I don’t know about you, but I find it amazing how much we do understand about the universe from collecting those tiny photons.

 

Lagoon Nebula

Lagoon nebula, taken with an LCOGT telescope in Hawaii during Macclesfield’s Barnaby Festival 2016

M13

M13, Milky Way globular cluster, taken with an LCOGT telescope in Hawaii during Macclesfield’s Barnaby Festival 2016

NGC5371

NGC5371, spiral galaxy, taken with an LCOGT telescope in Hawaii during Macclesfield’s Barnaby Festival 2016

M11

M11, the Wild Duck cluster, Milky Way open cluster, taken with an LCOGT telescope in Hawaii during Macclesfield’s Barnaby Festival 2016

NGC6712

NGC6712, Milky Way stellar cluster, taken with an LCOGT telescope in Hawaii during Macclesfield’s Barnaby Festival 2016

CRL2688

CRL2688, Milky Way post-AGB star, taken with an LCOGT telescope in Hawaii during Macclesfield’s Barnaby Festival 2016

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