Exploring the end of the Dark Ages ~ Dr Stephen Wilkins   ~ University of Sussex

The current consensus is that the Universe emerged from an incredibly hot and dense state approximately 14 billion years ago. As the Universe expanded it cooled and structures began to form. Eventually, a few hundred million years later, the Universe was lit up by the formation of the first generation of stars and super-massive black holes. The finite speed of light means that as we look out into the Universe we see it as it appeared in the past allowing us to observe the Universe lighting up in-situ. While recent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope has provided the first glimpse of this critical period of the Universe’s history the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in late 2018 will transform this field.

Dr Wilkins is Senior Lecturer in Astrophysics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Sussex.

The European Extremely Large Telescope ~ Roger Wood

The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) is a revolutionary scientific project for a 40m-class telescope that will allow us to address many of the most pressing unsolved questions about our Universe.

The E-ELT will be the largest optical/near-infrared telescope in the world and will gather 13 times more light than the largest optical telescopes existing today. The E-ELT will be able to correct for the atmospheric distortions (i.e., fully adaptive and diffraction-limited) from the start, providing images 16 times sharper than those from the Hubble Space Telescope. The E-ELT will vastly advance astrophysical knowledge by enabling detailed studies of planets around other stars, the first galaxies in the Universe, super-massive black holes, and the nature of the Universe's dark sector.

Pin hole photography ~ Bob Okines

We will be processing any pin hole camera images you bring along.