Art and its influence on our understanding of the cosmos

Talk by Greg Smye-Rumsby

For millenia, art has played a key role in unravelling the mysteries of the cosmos. Stories about the heavens and the position of the ’star signs’ have helped early communities understand the changing seasons and how best to grow and harvest crops for their very survival. Grappling with complicated concepts of the physical universe have often been helped by the use of diagrams and illustrations. Even today, CGI animations have been brought to bear to illustrated such complex motions of colliding galaxies or even the unfolding of the James Webb Space Telescope. This talk is all about art and how it has shaped our understanding of space.

Greg Smye-Rumsby has essentially two astronomical careers. Firstly, as a specialist planetarium presenter for the Royal Observatory Greenwich. This consists of presenting planetarium shows to schools and public alike but also providing teaching artworks and slides for the many school and public courses. He has also been asked to cover corporate evenings, TV presentations and provide engaging discourses for the ROG winter programme ‘An Evening with the Stars’. Secondly, Greg is a supplier of diagrams and celestial maps for Astronomy Now magazine and has also written a few articles occasionally.