Erica, Jacob and I drove over to the University of Hertfordshire’s Science Learning Centre at Bayfordbury yesterday for the University astronomy department’s open evening.
Our daughter (Jacob’s mum) and son-in-law, Doug, are both astrophysics PhD candidates at U Herts. Postgrads, including Doug, were on duty demonstrating various aspects of the department’s work. Doug, who’s involved in a schools science education project, was demonstrating an interesting – but obscure to me – device called the Timesnail.
Timesnail
Apparently this is a handy device that can be used to display events in the history of the Earth (no, not the date of the Great Fire of London – we’re talking astronomical time here) or frequencies of electromagnetic radiation. It can also be used, so I was told, to tell the time using the stars.
No stars
Sadly, though, we couldn’t test this. The evening was a cloudy one and damp – at least, it was until we were getting into the car to leave.
We did take a tour of the various telescopes that the university has at Brayfordbury. They’re all quite small telescopes – no giants here – each one in its own pod. I was told that this is one of the best – if not the best – undergraduate telescope installations in the UK.
Because of the damp the pods remained obdurately closed. All we could do was to look at pictures on computer screens of galaxies and star clusters that the telescopes had taken earlier. I hope to go back with my daughter and son-in-law on a clear night so that I actually look into space through some of these scopes.
Plenty of people, plenty to do
Plenty of people came to the open evening, lots of children included. There was a good selection of activities for young and not-so-young. We crowded into the tiny planetarium for a brief demonstration of what we might have seen in the night sky, had there been no clouds. Children cut out and stuck together paper models of Jupiter. Schmidt plates were on display and the astro-photographer Nik Szymanek was there in person, with prints, calendars and a book of wonderful astro-photographs.
Technorati Tags: astronomy, science, University of Hertfordshire, Brayfordbury, telescope, photography, Nik Szymanek
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{ 4 comments }
ahh that sounds like fun!!
It would have been more fun if the night had been clear and I hadn’t had my wretched cough.
November skies are usually good for star-gazing. Never mind, the summer will be here next year (hopefully)!
Timesnail: Where did you find? It is similar to the Fibonacci Number Sequence manifested in patterns all over nature. http://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMAT6680/Parveen/Fib_nature.htm
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