2 minute read
SKA project takes centre stage at UK’s oldest science festival
BY MATTHEW TAYLOR AND MATHIEU ISIDRO (SKAO)
The SKA Observatory received a royal welcome at a prestigious public outreach event in London, which saw more than 10,000 members of the public pass through over five days in July, as well as over 1,000 school children aged 8 to 16 from across the city and beyond.
The joint bid by the SKAO and the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) was selected in a competitive process to become one of just 13 exhibitors at the UK’s oldest science festival, the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. Invitation-only receptions also saw 1,200 guests including fellows of the Society, parliamentarians, and government representatives attend, including the current UK science minister, visiting the SKAO stand.
The exhibition dates back to 1778, when the Royal Society’s president started “conversaziones” as an opportunity for society fellows to show their latest research to members of the public, a tradition that continues to this day.
More than 45 volunteers from across UK partner institutions helped to relay the transformative science the SKAO will enable, as well as run simple experiments demonstrating how an array’s configuration and number of antennas impact image quality.
The SKAO exhibition stand featured a full-size SKA-Low antenna and SKA-Mid dish panel, which visitors were encouraged to sign to create a larger-than-life guestbook. There were also virtual reality headsets and interactive demos showing immersive views of the SKA telescope sites, as well as fun outreach and educational demos including the SKAO table-top radio telescope, colour-by-number sheets and paper antennas (available to download here)
The event was also an opportunity to release a visualisation and sonification of a pulsar with SKA-Low for the first time.
