GAC September meeting: Guest speaker: Brian MacGabhann

Galway Astronomy Club are pleased to announce details of our September club meeting, which will take place at 7.30 pm on Monday the 1st September in the Ardilaun Hotel, Taylors Hill, Galway.

Talk: ‘On the shoulders of Giants: The story of our attempts to understand the cosmos. ‘

We are so used to growing up with the knowledge that those strange lights in the night sky are stars and planets that it is difficult to picture how confusing and terrifying they must have appeared to our early ancestors. Armed with nothing more than their eyes and their imaginations our forbears slowly groped towards an understanding of what was above them. This is the story of that five thousand year journey, from the builders of the monuments of Newgrange and Stonehenge, to the astronomers of Babylon and Greece, through the fierce disputes of the Middle Ages and on in to the modern era of Space stations and Lunar landings. Along the way we’ll encounter a host of fascinating characters and stories; such as Aristarchus of Samos, who accurately measured the circumference of the Earth using two wooden sticks; and the mad Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe, who lost his nose in a sword fight and built a vast observatory on an underground Island; some of the giants on whose shoulders we now stand.

Speaker: Brian MacGabhann

Brian MacGabhann began amateur astronomy at the age of 14. He is the former education and outreach officer with Galway Astronomy Club, and later club chair. Brian helped organise the Galway Astronomy Festival for several years. He is the founder and resident lecturer with the Renmore History Society in Galway. He has lectured extensively to clubs and groups throughout Ireland, including giving lectures at Dunsink Observatory, and the Kerry and Mayo Dark Sky festivals and of course previously here at the Galway Astronomy Festival.