Science week was a busy one for us this year. The first exciting thing this week was completely unexpected when we found a solar projection on the wall in one of our offices. This was caused by a small hole in one of the shutters which projected the light onto the wall. This same method is often used with a piece of paper or a colander to view a solar eclipse, but ours was completely accidental this time.

On Wednesday our director, Prof. Peter Gallagher was featured on RTEs Future Island Live. He discussed the connections between our former director, William Rowen Hamilton, and the maths used to accomplish modern space flight. You can learn more about this connection on our Hamilton page. Of course this discussion was very timely given that the Artemis rocket had been launched for the moon just that morning.

On Thursday night we saw the return of our public visitor nights. We had plenty of activities available including a puzzle trail, children worksheets and even some escape room puzzles.

As well as these, we had two of our PhD students, Jeremy Rigney and Camille Stock, giving light speed talks about their research as well as some history and general astronomy.

Finally, on Friday, two of our staff members, Prof. Caitríona Jackman and our public engagement officer Sadhbh Leahy, visited Allen National School in county Kildare. They visited 1st class as well as junior and senior infants and explained some facts about the planets in our solar system and worked on some worksheets and games with the students.

We hope everyone enjoyed our Science Week activities and we hope to have many more in the future!