Daniel Brown

Memories unlocked and places explored: Stellarium a canvas to explore the temporality of skyscapes

Abstract

Skyscapes are the combination of landscape, sky and people. As a viewer explores their environment they start to realise how they dwell in a location filled with meanings, emotions and memories. This connection to Skyscapes occurs most powerfully when temporality is encountered not only through task and landscape exploration, but also by watching cosmic rhythms unfolding in the skies above.

This presentation will illustrate how the planetarium software stellarium allows to simulate long term cycles of celestial motions but has the powerful potential to include panoramic landscapes. Rather than constituting photo realistic imagery they should be seen as a canvas onto which one can express the place experience encountered. This allows for a creative and imaginary approach to express temporal aspects of the landscape, shaped by a dialogue between people, culture, seasons and the sky.

Overall this presentation calls for artist to include Stellarium into their work to explore Skyscapes.

Biography

I am a professional astronomer who graduated from Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany, and carried out my PhD at the Liverpool John Moores University, UK. I am working at Nottingham Trent University and its on-site observatory, where I am supporting astronomy teaching and outreach work with the general public and schools. This includes working with creative practitioners and theatre groups. The focus of my outreach work is based on archaeoastronomy and the use of the outdoor classroom. Furthermore, I am a founding member of the ‘Horizontastronomie im Ruhrgebiet e.V.’, a German private initiative promoting astronomy outreach based on an EU funded Science Park located within the Ruhr area.