In the Dark

Last night, as advertised, we held our Space Week Event at Maynooth University. This has been running for a few years now but last night was the first time we have included planetarium shows in our inflatable dome shows alongside the usual short lectures.

That resulted in much greater organizational challenges, as the space in the dome is quite limited so we had to split those wanting to attend a show into manageable groups, and that in turn meant quite a few people moving in and out of the lecture theatre to and from the dome, which were in different locations. It all went off well, though.

The weather last night was inclement, cold and with heavy rain, but despite that we had about 250 in the lectures. There were lots of young children, some perhaps as young as five years old, and I was very impressed by the quality of the questions they asked at the end of the talks and in the coffee break.

We had a last-minute change of order of lectures because one of our speakers was stuck in traffic on the way to campus. I was promoted to No. 2 in the running order instead of No. 4, which I was quite happy about because it meant I finished earlier. After it was all over we adjourned to O’Neill’s for a pint or two.

Thanks to everyone from the Department of Physics who participated in the preparations for, and running of, the event, and to all the people who came long and made it such fun!

P.S. The resemblance between the title of the event at the title of this blog is purely coincidental.

This entry was posted on October 9, 2026 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags Department of Physics Maynooth University, Maynooth University, Planetarium, Space Week. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.