Although I won’t myself be able to attend, I’m happy to be able to use the medium of this blog to advertise the above public event which is taking place in the first week of September on the back of a week-long conference to celebrate the career of Professor Tom Ray of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. That in turn follows hard on the heels of the Irish National Astronomy Meeting (INAM) which takes place in Galway on 29th and 30th August.
Anyway, the public event on 3rd September is free to attend but you need to register here, where it is described thusly:
The Newgrange Passage Tomb, a prehistoric monument in County Meath, Ireland, is one of the most remarkable examples of Neolithic art and architecture, dating back to around 3200 BC. This ancient structure, with its intricate stone carvings and precise alignment with the winter solstice sunrise, reflects the sophisticated astronomical knowledge of its builders.
With starkly different technology, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), launched in 2021, represents the pinnacle of modern astronomical achievement. JWST is designed to peer into the farthest reaches of the universe, capturing images and data from the formation of the earliest galaxies to the atmospheres of planets outside of/beyond our solar system.
Despite being separated by millennia, both Newgrange and JWST underscore humanity’s enduring quest to understand our place in the cosmos through the study of the stars and the universe.
As part of the celebration of the career of Professor Tom Ray the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the Institute of Physics are delighted to host a public event on Newgrange and JWST. This is in recognition of Tom’s long interest in archaeoastronomy and Newgrange in particular, and his involvement with the JWST through the Mid-Infrared instrument (MIRI).
The talk will be delivered by Dr. Frank Prendergast, archaeoastronomer and Emeritus Research Fellow at Technological University Dublin, and Professor Gillian Wright, European Principal Investigator of MIRI and Director of the UK Astronomy Technology Centre in Edinburgh.
