Our visit began with a tour of the night sky, unfortunately (and to my extreme disappointment) the summer time sky prevented us from looking at the stars, planets and constellations so we used a programme called 'Stellarium' to look at the night sky (Link to Stellarium website). We had a look at Ursa Major and identified where the North Star (Polaris) was which was a lot of fun with Stellarium! Another great thing about the programme is that you can look at the planets in so much detail - the bands of cloud on Jupiter were visible, it was as if I was there!
After the tour of the night sky, we went outside to have a look at the many telescopes at the site. We had a look at the sun through two small ones (with a filter to keep our eyes safe of course), then went to two huge radio telescopes (one detected radio waves from hydrogen and the other detected waves from methanol). Next we saw a telescope station with an array of telescopes with mirrors rather than lenses (one of them even had a GPS system built into it so it could tell you exactly where you were and things of note in the sky at the time you were there!) and finally we went into a huge observatory with a 14 inch telescope (pictured below) and a revolving dome (I was like a child in a sweetie shop)!
To conclude, we went back into the building to listen to a talk on the sun. The sun has extremely random magnetic activity, this causes solar flares when magnetic fields in the sun pointing in opposite directions interact. Also the sun has sunspots - these are cooler areas of the sun which are also darker due to the lower temperature. Finally we learned about how the sun makes its energy, through nuclear fusion (a topic I'm slightly obsessed with).
If you ever visit York and are interested in Physics, Astrophysics, Astronomy or just an educational and fun evening, visit the Astrocampus - it's definitely worth it! (Astrocampus Website)
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