Date: 19th January 2024
Location: Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
Every year RAL's Public Engagement team organises a stargazing event for the public, where the lights around our visitor's centre are switched off to allow a better view of the night sky. If the weather doesn't cooperate (which English weather rarely does), Stargazing also features a range of activities suitable for the whole family.
Our department got involved with providing these activities, including:
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Daffodil detectors - guiding visitors to make their own daffodil detector to mirror the flower-shaped scintillator display created by one of our staff members and teach them more about scintillation materials and their uses.
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Time-slice camera - which captures photos of a subject in three dimensions and generates a freeze-frame movie of them, recreating the 'bullet-time' effect found in the Matrix movies.
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Flip-chip demo - allowing visitors to try their hands at precise electronics assembly with a real bonding machine
- Space-age materials - using handling items and a small experiment shape memory alloy experiment to demonstrate the materials used in spacecraft.
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Levitating train - utilising superconducting magnets and liquid nitrogen to create a 'levitating' Maglev train.
See some of our staff and their activities below.
Ashley, Tim, Will, and Joseph in the timeslice camera
Dan and the flip-chip demo (left) and Steve, Simon, and Ben ready to run the space-age materials and levitating train activities (right)
Our levitating train activity
The daffodil scintillator
