2008 Astronomy Festival
Speaker information
saturday 6 September 2008
In addition to the admission charge, there will be an
additional charge of £2.00 for each lecture
Will Gater, BBC Sky at Night Magazine (speaking from 2.45 pm to
3.45 pm)
“Before
becoming a full-time science writer in 2007, Will studied Astrophysics at
University College London. He has written for the UK’s top astronomy magazines
and has appeared on television and radio (including the BBC’s The Sky At Night)
to promote astronomy and science. He has worked for the European Space Agency's
Hubble Space Telescope press office in Germany and is a former News Editor of
Astronomy Now magazine in the UK. Today Will writes for BBC Sky At Night
magazine. His first popular astronomy book is due to be published by Springer in
2009.” For more information about Will visit
www.willgater.com
Title: “Not just pretty pictures - The science behind Hubble’s greatest images”.
When Will worked with the European Space Agency’s Hubble group last year he
compiled a lecture of some 60 high resolution images and videos taken with
Hubble. For each slide he explains the amazing astronomy going on in the vista
in a simple and hopefully understandable way.
Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest, Hencoup Enterprises (speaking from 12.00
pm to 1.00 pm)
Nigel
Henbest and Heather Couper,
are two international science communicators based in Oxford. Astrophysicists by
training, they now popularise astronomy and space - not to mention weather,
volcanoes, the countryside and archaeology. Between them they cover all the
media, from TV to newspapers, voice-overs to corporate presentations, radio to
books. In addition to their own separate professional lives (see
www.hencoup.com/Heather.htm
and www.hencoup.com/Nigel.htm ) they also collaborate on projects where they can
bring together a synergy of their combined skills and enthusiasm. And with names
like Henbest and Couper, what else would they call ourselves but "Hencoup
Enterprises"?!
Title: “From Babylon – to the Big Bang”
This presentation has been distilled from a 30 part series “Cosmic Quest”
which will be broadcast on Radio 4. The material is derived from a book Heather
and Nigel researched by interviewing leading experts all over the world. The
book is entitled 'The History of Astronomy'.
Nik Szymanek, British Astronomical Association (speaking from 4.00 pm
to 5.00 pm)
Nik
Syzmanek has had a lifelong interest in astronomy and has been involved with
astrophotography since 1990. He regularly travels to La Palma in the Canary
Islands where he has teamed up with a lot of the professional astronomers and on
numerous occasions has been invited to apply his image processing techniques to
professional data taken with the 4.2m William Herschel, 2.5m Isaac Newton and 1m
Jacobus Kapteyn telescopes located there. Recently he has become heavily
involved with the Faulkes telescope Project. In July 2004 he received the
Astronomical Society of the Pacific’s Amateur Achievement Award. He writes
prolifically for many astronomy magazines and has published a book in
collaboration with Astronomy Now, on astrophotography entitled “Infinity
Rising.” For more information about Nik Szymanek click on
www.ccdland.com
Title: “Photographing the Night Sky”
This will cover film, webcams and CCD imaging. The talk is designed to show
people who may be starting out in astrophotography that good results can be
obtained with very basic equipment. Part of the talk will show what it's like to
work under the beautiful dark skies of La Palma in the Canary Islands and
Hawaii, including an 8 minute video with time-lapse photography. There is also
something about more advanced techniques covering the use of CCD cameras to
produce striking colour pictures of deep sky objects and the use of specialised
filters to get round the problems of light pollution. This year there will be
many new photographs from Nik.
Professor
Bob
Nichol
University
of Portsmouth (speaking from 1.30 pm to
2.30 pm)
In May 2004, I moved back to the UK after 12 years in the US at Carnegie
Mellon
University
and University of
Chicago. It is good to be
back, but I miss Chicago, friends, colleagues and American Football (Go
Steelers!). In 2004 I was also awarded a Marie Curie Excellence Chair and thank
the EU and University of Portsmouth for their incredible support.
I am now a Professor of Astrophysics at the Institute
of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) at
the University of
Portsmouth. Bob is also
involved with GalaxyZoo a project enlisting the help of the public in
classifying galaxies
www.galaxyzoo.org For more information about Bob please visit
http://dsg.port.ac.uk/~nicholb/
Title: “GalaxyZoo.”
Dr Graham Dolan, National Maritime Museum,
Greenwich (speaking from 10.45 am to 11.45 am)
Graham Dolan is Senior Education Officer at the Royal Observatory in
Greenwich and a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. His particular areas
of interest include the Greenwich Meridian and the history of the Royal
Observatory at Greenwich. He has written a number of books, including On the
Line: the story of the Greenwich Meridian. For more information about the
National Maritime Museum visit
www.nmm.ac.uk
Picture credit
© National Maritime Museum.
Title: “Connecting with the Past.”
50 years ago, in 1958, many of the equatorials saw first light in their new
location at Herstmonceux. Of the five transferred from Greenwich, four were
already over 50 years old, having been built in the 1880s and 1890s for William
Christie, the 8th Astronomer Royal. This talk will look at how
these instruments came to be commissioned, along with their subsequent
history and use at Greenwich