I’ve always been fascinated by the night sky.
Regular readers will probably already know this, because over the last few months I’ve written quite a bit about astronomy and astrophotography. I’ve experimented with the remarkable little Dwarf Mini telescope, photographed galaxies and nebulae from home and even carried it halfway around the world to Bolivia, where I was lucky enough to stand beneath one of the darkest skies I have ever seen.
But this time, instead of trying to photograph the universe, we were going to step inside it.
We went into Manchester to experience Smithsonian Starstruck – An Immersive Experience, presented by Fever in collaboration with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
And what an experience it was.
Starstruck is a virtual reality experience, but describing it simply as VR doesn’t really do it justice.
Once the headset goes on, the room around you disappears and suddenly you’re somewhere completely different.
The experience begins at an observatory on Earth before taking you on a journey out into space. You can move around freely and, despite knowing perfectly well that you’re actually standing in a room in Manchester, your brain very quickly starts accepting the world being presented in front of you.
You look around.
You look above you.
You look beneath you.
And suddenly the scale of the universe begins to make a little more sense.
Or perhaps it makes even less sense, because the numbers involved are almost impossible for us to comprehend.
From the Big Bang to galaxies, stars and planets
One of the things I particularly enjoyed was the way Starstruck attempts to explain how everything fits together.
We travelled back towards the beginnings of the universe and the Big Bang before seeing how matter eventually came together, forming stars, galaxies and the incredible structures that we now photograph through telescopes.
There were nebulae – enormous clouds of gas and dust where stars are born – and explanations of the life cycle of stars.
You witness a supernova and see how material from dying stars can eventually become part of new stars and planets.
It is quite a thought.
The atoms that make up the world around us – and indeed ourselves – ultimately have a connection with stars that existed long before our own Solar System.
Standing inside a virtual representation of all this gives it a scale that a photograph on a screen simply can’t.
Hubble, James Webb and Chandra
The experience also introduces some of the incredible instruments humanity has built to look deeper into the universe.
Most people will have heard of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Launched in 1990, Hubble completely transformed our view of space and produced some of the most recognisable astronomical photographs ever taken.
One of those is the famous Pillars of Creation, part of the Eagle Nebula – huge columns of gas and dust where new stars are forming.
Then there is the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021.
Webb observes primarily in infrared light, allowing astronomers to peer through dust and look extraordinarily far back in time. Because light takes time to travel across the universe, looking at extremely distant galaxies really is looking into the past.
The other observatory featured in Starstruck is the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Chandra looks at the universe in X-rays rather than visible light, allowing scientists to study some of the most energetic phenomena out there, including exploding stars and black holes.
There’s also an encounter with NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, the spacecraft sent closer to the Sun than any spacecraft before it.
Seeing these machines represented at scale in virtual reality is fascinating.
We tend to see photographs of telescopes and spacecraft on a television or computer screen, but VR provides a completely different sense of their size.
Then there’s the Sun…
We all know the Sun is enormous.
We’re taught it at school.
You can read the dimensions and compare them with Earth, but numbers on a page don’t necessarily prepare you for seeing the difference represented visually.
Starstruck takes you close to the Sun and demonstrates the extraordinary violence taking place on the surface of the star that keeps every one of us alive.
Solar flares suddenly look rather different when you’re virtually standing beside them!
And yet our Sun is simply one star amongst an almost unimaginable number of stars in our galaxy.
Then you start thinking about how many galaxies there are.
That’s the point where my brain begins to struggle.
A black hole is something else entirely
Another memorable part of the experience takes you towards a supermassive black hole.
Black holes are one of those things that almost sound as though somebody invented them for science fiction.
An object with gravity so powerful that beyond a certain point even light cannot escape.
Yet they are real.
Getting anywhere near one in reality obviously isn’t something any of us are likely to add to the holiday itinerary, so virtual reality is probably the safer option!
Again, it’s the sense of scale that makes Starstruck work so well.
You aren’t simply looking at an illustration of a black hole. You feel as though you are approaching one.
From photographing nebulae to standing amongst them
This was probably the part that connected Starstruck most strongly with my own interest in astrophotography.
Earlier this year I started experimenting with the Dwarf Mini, a tiny smart telescope which still feels slightly impossible to me.
I wrote about my first experiences with it here:
The Dwarf Mini – it feels like this should be impossible!
It can automatically locate and photograph objects in the night sky that are effectively invisible to our eyes from light-polluted areas.
Galaxies.
Nebulae.
Star clusters.
Things that are sitting above our heads every night, whether we can see them or not.
Then I took the Dwarf Mini with me to Peru and Bolivia.
Eventually we reached Uyuni, where I found myself standing beneath an astonishingly dark sky at over 12,000 feet. The Milky Way was clearly visible with the naked eye and I had the opportunity to photograph deep-sky objects from conditions completely unlike those I normally experience back home.
You can read about that adventure here:
The Dwarf Mini and its adventure in Peru and Bolivia – including one of the darkest places on Earth
There was something particularly satisfying, therefore, about seeing nebulae and galaxies presented during Starstruck.
I’ve photographed some of these sorts of objects as tiny patches of colour appearing gradually on my phone screen as the telescope stacks exposure after exposure.
Now I was virtually standing amongst them.
And then there was Jodrell Bank
Our visit also reminded me of our recent trip to Jodrell Bank in Cheshire.
There we stood underneath the enormous Lovell Telescope and learned about a completely different way of exploring the universe.
Unlike Hubble or James Webb, the Lovell Telescope doesn’t produce the colourful photographs most of us associate with astronomy. It is a radio telescope, detecting radio waves arriving from space.
I wrote about our visit here:
Jodrell Bank, Cheshire – educational and fascinating site of a radio telescope
Between Jodrell Bank, experimenting with astrophotography and now Starstruck, I’m beginning to realise just how many different ways there are of looking at the universe.
Visible light is only a tiny part of the story.
Radio telescopes can detect one part of it.
Chandra looks at X-rays.
James Webb looks predominantly in infrared.
And each reveals something that our own eyes simply cannot see.
So, is Starstruck worth visiting?
For us, yes.
It manages to explain some extremely complicated subjects without making you feel as though you’re sitting through a science lesson.
Children can enjoy flying through space and seeing stars explode.
Adults can do exactly the same thing!
But underneath the entertainment there is some fascinating science.
For somebody like me who already has an interest in astronomy and astrophotography, it added another dimension to things I’ve previously read about and photographed.
For somebody who knows very little about astronomy, I suspect it might just spark an interest.
Most importantly, though, it leaves you with that same feeling I had looking upwards in Bolivia and standing underneath the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank.
Perspective.
We spend our lives worrying about traffic, work, bills and what we’re having for dinner.
Then somebody shows you a galaxy containing billions of stars, reminds you that there are countless other galaxies beyond it and points out that the light reaching us may have been travelling across space for millions or even billions of years.
Suddenly being stuck in traffic on the M60 doesn’t seem quite such a big problem.
Smithsonian Starstruck is in Manchester’s Northern Quarter and, if you have even a passing interest in space, astronomy or simply experiencing something rather different, I’d certainly recommend giving it a go.
It really does make you realise just how incredibly small we are.
And just how much there is still to discover.
