This October, we were thrilled to be invited back for the 2022 Sidmouth Science Festival. We were part of the Family Science Day at the Norman Lockyer Observatory, where we hosted our usual outreach stall featuring new James Webb Space Telescope activities and delivered a series of talks.

We were joined by Alice Mills from the Exeter Science Center and Claire Davies from the University to help deliver a series of talks. Alice explained how we measure distances in astronomy, starting off with our solar system, building up to our galaxy and eventually to those spanning the entire universe.

Claire took the audience on a journey to discover how stars and planets form, starting with the collapse of interstellar dust due to gravity to form stars and protoplanetary discs. From these discs, over long periods of time, a wide variety of planets can form.

To capitalise on the excitement and interest of the public in the newly launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), our society President, Alex Mcginty, gave a talk titled ‘Exploring Exoplanets with JWST’. This focused on the various techniques used by astronomers to detect exoplanets and finished with a tour of some of the most interesting exoplanets we have discovered so far. The talk can be found on our YouTube channel here.

Stay Spacey – The Committee