Open night 2019 – Emission line crazy
Left – detail of Open Night poster. Right – artwork photographed in sunlight
Looking back on the sequence of events in the recent evolution of the Twin Dome, it’s been something of a juggling act to try to avoid placing any of the various events in the wrong order – which is precisely what’s happened here. Looking closely at the records I see that Open Night 2019 took place on Saturday, March the 16th – so slightly before than the previous two posts. That all three events happened in the year before the Covid lockdown perhaps suggests the possibility of being slightly obscured by a pandemic fog.
Open Night 2019 involved one giant, suspended sheet of paper, 7 metres wide and one and a half metres tall. Onto this the open night audience were invited to take up any of the art materials to hand – spray cans, acrylic paints, oil pastels, watercolours, etc – and create their own stylised spectra, anywhere across the vast canvass. Evidence of real emission spectra were also at hand – if guidance was needed – as well as a good number of university astronomers – lecturers and students – as is always the case on an observatory open night.
The resulting artwork survived for a few years (the space can get pretty damp in the winter) and one fine morning I dragged it out into the sunshine to make a record of the slightly frenzied, spectral mayhem that took place on the Spring Open Night of 2019.