Mount Stromlo Observatory in conjunction with the Canberra Astronomical Society invite the Canberra community to Enlighten at Mount Stromlo. With the New Moon, the sky will be dark, and we will peer out in a fun way.

On this special evening, we will light up the domes, light up the sky with our lasers, as well as enjoy views of the nighttime sky.

This event is made possible by the generosity of Epson and support from the ACT Government.

There will be four locations with projections and work.

Inside the Yale-Columbia:

Anna Madeleine Raupach and Diana Chester - Light Echoes, VR artwork and spatial data sonification.

Light Echoes is an immersive media artwork that celebrates the workforce of women ‘human computers’ who worked on the Astrographic Catalogue in the 19th and 20th century. These women’s work in measuring the positions of stars was a major contribution to this international scientific endeavour and is under-acknowledged in published documentation. Light Echoes transcribes signatures found in hundreds of logbooks held in the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences collection, at Sydney Observatory, and in the NSW Archives, into a virtual sky map. Using sonification, the associated star measurements are turned from data into a celestial soundscape of the night sky as it existed when these calculations were made. This new virtual sky map embeds the women’s re-animated hand-drawn signatures into the sonified astronomical coordinates of the stars they mapped.

Produced through a Research Fellowship with the Powerhouse Museum.

Pia van Gelder - Controlling Voltages with Hands

An excerpt of a live performance staged at Tin Sheds Gallery (Sydney) in 2013. The performance explores the use of a live video input as a control voltage in an audio video synthesiser patch. The image from a video camera is used to control both video oscillators and audio oscillators by making variations to the control frequencies causing modulations in the visual patterns and variations in the low audio frequencies. The image from the camera is also fed through video mixing equipment to create visual feedback and control colour saturation.

Special thanks to Ollie Bown for recording the audio from this performance.

Stephen Slater - Apollo 11 Launch

View this 70mm high-resolution recording of humanity's first trip to land on the Moon

Inside Director's Residnce Garage:

Erica Seccombe - Celestial body: so near yet so far

Created to celebrate the Apollo 11 first moon landing, Celestial body: so near yet so far, plays on the concept of this common origin of luna and terrestrial mantel rock. Distorting proximity, I have visualised and animated a volumetric sample of volcanic basalt only .5 mm in diameter to appear like the Moon. Tipping my hat to all things c1960s sci-fi, I have also rendered it as an anaglyphic (red/cyan) moving image that appears in 3D when viewed through coloured glasses. Originally I intended to Micro-CT-scan an actual luna sample for this exhibition, and although I got very close to achieving this I was chasing the impossible. This led me to consider a different kind of experience that challenges our perceptions between near and far, micro and the macro and ultimately celebrates the power of the human imagination.

Projections will also be outside on the 74" dome next to stargazing as well as inside the Director's Residence

Wildbark at Mulligans Flat will also be operating in the cafe selling hot cholcolate and some small meals.