ISLAND MAGIC, GLOBAL INSIGHTS
It's really spring now! The sun has been coming out strongly to encourage us all, and Orkney's looking a lot greener now, with flowers coming out as well.
We're making progress with the planning of this year's Orkney Science Festival. In fcat we're trying to complete the initial outline of the programme this week.
May and early June is when we find the ideas coming in, and we shuffle and reshuffle the different options until the overall shape starts to appear.
This year once again some great ideas have come forward from Orkney itself, and from quite literally around the world.
So for instance we're going to have visitors from Australia, for the special Scottish Homecoming event on Saturday 5 September.
The Homecoming event is linked to the Earth Charter, and we're working on plans for talks and films on a variety of environmental themes, from bees to gorillas. We'll also be marking this year of the Darwin anniversary.
And the RSPB are working on a special event with Orkney schools around Scapa Flow - we'll have more news of this as well by the end of April. It's going to have a lively marine theme and we're looking forward to it.
And food will also be to the fore this year - from sea buckthorn berries to Orkney beremeal. Connoisseurs of Orkney food will recognise this as a code message for more Orkney high teas. And bere bannocks and oatcakes. And crab.
Over the weeks ahead, we'll be building up the detail of the programme (and sampling the bere bannocks and crab in advance, just to get in the right mood).
The dates, by the way, are 3-9 September 2009.
Meanwhile, here from last year are some astronomical images that provoked a few admiring sounds. They were taken by Andrew Elliott, who has won the British Astronomical Association’s Merlin Medal for his pioneering work in advancing video astronomy. And meanwhile on the pages of this site you can see some of the many images of the Festival that were taken by the Slovenian artist Selena Kuzman.
These images of Andrew’s are on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl-sS7iQeoM
More news soon!
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