The House of Astronomy: Astrofest

It was my first time.

I’d toyed with the idea before, more than once. Attending a genuinely large-scale amateur astronomy event had been an appealing thought ever since I had reacquainted myself in retirement with the chief of my geeky teenage hobbies, but … The annual European Astrofest, held this year in Kensington Town Hall, London, was too good a chance to miss. Apart from anything else, we’ve had two years of the most miserably damp and cloudy Winters in my part of the world with telescopes tucked away unused – so, in the absence of ‘traditional’ cold, crisp and clear nights, maybe a conference on astronomy would cheer us up.

I travelled with three fellow members of the South East Kent Astronomy Society (SEKAS). It was a long day – beginning with an alarm at 05:00 so that I could catch an early train to London, meet my SEKAS friends and be at the venue in good time for the first of several talks. SEKAS is one of three local amateur astronomy groups that I count myself a member of, but it holds two key advantages for me: it is dedicated to outreach and that resonates with my own longstanding passion for science communication, and it streams its monthly meetings online. The latter is really useful to those of us who choose not to drive on less familiar roads after dark. (It’s sad that the three SEKAS outreach events I participated in recently were all messed up by cloud and rain.) One of the very first happy discoveries of the day was that the SEKAS crowd have a tradition of buying a breakfast in a small, but perfectly formed, café off Kensington High Street. I’m glad I’d only had a very light pre-dawn breakfast, but this still made me feel a little like a hobbit enjoying Second Breakfast. I’m grateful to Andrew for supplying photographic evidence .

Astrofest ran for two days, but I booked in for the second day only. In future years I’d be tempted to do both days given the quality of the talks and the breadth of the trade/society exhibits spread over three floors. There were two talks on the Friday schedule for this year, for instance, that I’m particularly sad about missing: Prof. Michele Dougherty, the Astronomer Royal and a principal Investigator on missions to Saturn and Jupiter, and Sir Brian May who recently published a book of 3D galactic images. However, I enjoyed several excellent talks on the day I was there which covered a range of contemporary research as well as a wonderfully nostalgic look at what is still, after more than four decades, my favourite space exploration mission.

A quick snap on my phone before the lights went down and one of the talks got started – just to illustrate the fact that these sessions had audiences of several hundred amateurs like me.

First up was Dr Steph Yardley and her stunning images and video clips of the Sun derived from ESA/NASA’s Solar Orbiter data. In complete contrast, Josh Howgego talked about his own home-grown attempts to sift out from the detritus in his gutters a few examples of the enormous quantity of micrometeorites that reach the Earth’s surface each day. There’s no doubt that his science journalist’s take on the subject will motivate the clearing of a great many gutters in the next year or two. Moreover, it reminded me of a recent research project supervised by a space scientist at my own former university (Dr Penny Wozniakiewicz) which involved vacuuming the roof of Canterbury Cathedral. There were talks which reviewed ESA’s past, present and planned solar system missions; that looked at the use of polarised light as a means of mapping a galaxy’s magnetic fields; that considered the engineering challenges associated with making the very best telescope mirrors; which outlined the NASA Psyche mission en route to an asteroid primarily made of iron and nickel. However, the session that dug deep into my lifelong fascination with space exploration was the interview of Dr Garry Hunt by Prof. Lucie Green. Garry had been the only British Principal Investigator on the imaging team associated with the Voyager missions. Almost irrespective of what he actually said – which was interesting in its own right – it was such a pleasure to be able to revisit this pair of amazing ‘grand tour’ missions. It’s also salutary to remember that after decades flying at truly prodigious speeds the Voyager satellites are still less than one light-day away. (The nearest stars are, remember, several light-years away.) As Douglas Adams informed us in his radio play The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy* “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is”

A very low-quality image of Garry and Lucie on stage discussing the Voyager missions. In passing, the monitor screen to the right displayed speech-to-text in real time: it was surprisingly effective, even for one later speaker who had a heavy accent.

Much as I love learning, there was more to the day than that alone. For example, it gave me another opportunity to spend time with and to get to know better some of my fellow SEKAS members and astro-enthusiasts. Not only do they possess between them a seemingly inexhaustible fund of useful and constructive advice, but they’re also a pleasure to be around; it’s a nice combo. Beyond that I had the fun of putting faces to the names I’ve been coming across online for a while: the folk from First Light Optics for instance, from whom I’ve bought an embarrassing number of bits and pieces#, and individuals like Gary Palmer who got me started on imaging the Sun using narrow-band filters (see my earlier post here). Mary McIntyre, who is a frequent contributor to the BBC Sky at Night magazine, was running a workshop on lunar sketching; I wish I could, but it would be embarrassing. The national astronomy societies and several interest groups were there in force, some of which I’ve been supporting for years: the BAA for instance, and Dark Skies (see also here).

One DIY display caught my eye. It was the SKAO (- originally the Square Kilometre Array Observatory back in the days when I first started hearing about it). Hardly a DIY project on the face of it, but they showed a demonstration of a basic radio telescope fabricated from an umbrella, a tin can and some simple circuitry connected to a laptop. With it, they claimed to be able to detect the arc of the Milky Way. I might have a go at this one day – at the very least it would give me something to do on a cloudy day.

And then there is the abundance of opportunities to spend money … I mean, serious money! I resisted, naturally 😉. However, that’s not to say I didn’t gaze with a modest level of avarice now and again. For instance, there was a display outlining the plan for an observatory hosting site in Oman away from serious light pollution and in a location boasting ten times as many clear nights per annum as I get. There are several such sites in existence around the world already of course – indeed, the telescope used for my introduction to solar imaging was sited in Spain and accessed via the internet – so the model is proven. It will be interesting to see whether this new proposal will come to fruition; I wish them well and I’d love to be able to take part, but I’m simply not in that league. In passing, the proposal is labelled Dar Al-Falak which translates as House of Astronomy, and which inspired the title of this post.

I ought to confess that I did spend some money before the end of the day. There was a stand with meteorites for sale and I simply couldn’t resist. I bought a small fragment of the Campo del Cielo iron meteorite (£8/€9) and a teeny, tiny fragment of lunar meteorite NWA11273 (a feldspatic breccia, £14/€16). Next stop, a rocky meteorite and maybe something from Mars? I also bought enough solar viewing glasses for a whole primary school class in preparation for my next school visit; one stall associated with a major astro supplier asked £69/€79 for 25 (!) but I found another stall, run by a lovely chatty couple, who gave me 40 for £30/€35 – yes please 😊

* The book spin-off (Pan Books Ltd, London, 1979) was based on the original BBC Radio 4 series of the same name which ran from 8th March 1978 to 12th April, with subsequent series to come later. I remember listening to this late-night innovative radio play with rapt attention, along with my wife and a couple of friends in a bedsit in Leicester. (One of those friends went on to become a professional astronomer, spending years working on the IRAS infra-red telescope – forerunner to both the Hubble and the James Webb space telescopes.)

# Other companies are available, like Altair Astro from whom I’ve bought all four of my CMOS astro-cameras and one of my telescopes (- I’ve mentioned them in previous posts), and so many more.