Here comes the Sun

Some of you will have seen that the Science Museum has recently opened a spectacular exhibition The Sun: Living with our Star. The exhibition includes a number of wonderful images of the Sun from the Science Museum art collections, images that are not just representations, but working tools used as part of the process of understanding the Sun.

I've had the opportunity to be involved in a number of outputs related to the exhibition, based around this imagery, which I thought I would bring together for my readers here.

Book

I co-wrote the exhibition book with Dr Harry Cliff (Lead Curator) The Sun: One Thousand Years of Scientific Imagery.

"This book, written to accompany The Sun: Living With Our Star exhibition at the Science Museum, charts our unwavering fascination with the Sun through a rich collection of scientific imagery. From the first sketch of a sunspot by a twelfth-century monk, to awe-inspiring close-ups taken by orbiting spacecraft, these images can also be appreciated as works of art; a personal dedication from the theologians, artists and astronomers who made them.

With never-before published photographs and illustrations of eclipses and eruptions, the violent solar surface and the planets that surround it, this book will show you the Sun as you’ve never seen it before, as well as the imaging processes that have helped scientists and amateurs alike learn about our nearest star."

Media

I did a short film for the Science Museum looking at some of the works in the exhibition.

I was invited to do an Art Matters podcast with Art UK looking broadly at the Science Museum Art Collections, where we also focused in on some sun imagery. I wrote a follow-up blog about the Nasmyth sunspots [edited 17/11/18 to add this link].