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The Hebridean Dark Skies Festival presents a series of interviews with fascinating people from the worlds of astronomy, psychology, and the arts, exploring our festival themes of winter, darkness and the night sky. The podcasts are presented by festival director Andrew Eaton-Lewis, with sound mixed by Hamish Brown. The Hebridean Dark Skies Festival is an ambitious annual programme of events taking place each February on the Isle of Lewis, including live music, film, visual art, theatre, astr ...
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What does a sunset mean to you? Sunset Reports, screening as part of the 2022 Hebridean Dark Skies Festival's opening night on Friday 11 February, is a 52-minute film in which artist Juliana Capes describes an entire sunset, moment by moment. In episode eight of our podcast, Juliana explains how the film was shaped by her work describing art for vi…
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Is it possible to explain the mysteries of the Universe using only the 1000 most commonly used words in English? Or Gaelic? The Edge of the Sky | Oir Nan Speur is a unique new theatre show, adapted from a book in which award-winning science communicator Roberto Trotta tries to explain some of the most complex ideas in astronomy using only the 1000 …
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Catherine Heymans is Scotland's Astronomer Royal and a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh. Joe Zuntz is a Reader in Astrophysics at the University Of Edinburgh. Together they perform a comedy show called The Universe: Does Anything Matter?, which is coming to the Hebridean Dark Skies Festival in 2022. In episode six of our fes…
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The Outer Hebrides’ relationship with astronomy, Bethany Rigby says, “embodies humanity’s changing view of our place within the universe”. The designer, researcher and writer, above, is now the creator of Outer Hebrides // Outer Space, a new research project that explores our islands’ astronomical significance, from the Neolithic Age of celestial o…
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An astrophysicist who has lived and worked all over the world, Sheona Urquhart spent much of her childhood in the north of Scotland gazing at the stars, and is as fascinated by myths and legends, from the Hebrides to Hawaii, as she is by Extragalactic Astrophysics, the subject of her PHD from the University of Victoria in Canada. The episode is hos…
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A musician, composer and sound artist, Renzo Spiteri has performed at festivals across the world, working between England and Malta. He is now based in Shetland, whose landscape inspired his latest project, Stillness, described as “an immersive live performance that takes audiences on a journey through the different textures of darkness and light”.…
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How come one of the coldest, darkest places in the world has relatively low rates of wintertime depression? Health psychologist Kari Leibowitz spent a year investigating this as a Fulbright Scholar in Tromsø, Norway, which is so far north that it experiences a “Polar Night,” the time from November to January when the sun never rises. Kari has gone …
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Scottish singer-songwriter Karine Polwart has long been fascinated by astronomy. At the 2020 Hebridean Dark Skies Festival she performed The Only Light Was Stars, a ‘work in progress’ version of a new show inspired by supernovas, in front of an audience for the first time. One year on, we catch up with Karine and talk astronomy, art, UFOs, drunken …
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