[Outreach] The Royal Highland Show 2012

The week after I got back from Le Mans I was straight back into an incredibly busy week. Not working on my PhD, but doing outreach with the Planetarium team. We were invited, for the first time, to take part in the Royal Highland Show at Ingliston. I, of course, jumped at the chance to reach a much wider audience, but didn't realise just what I was letting myself in for!

The poster that was drawn for us by the marquee's resident artist. (Credit: David Brown)

We were invited down to be part of the SEARS marquee, organised and run by a variety of Scottish Government organisations, including the forestry commission. In the last couple of years, Galloway Forest has been designated a "dark skies park", protecting its beautiful view of the night sky for future generations. The forestry commission were looking to promote the park, and got in touch with a variety of organisations to ask for planetarium shows. We were the only ones to respond, so we got the job.

It was a little more constrained than our usual format. The show runs over four days, from Thursday to Sunday, with the first two days involving lots of school groups, with members of the public wandering around as well, and the weekend being entirely general access. The schools are able to pre-book various activities, which meant that we were constrained to half-hour slots for our presentations. That's about 2/3rds of the time that I usually spend giving shows, but the timing meant that the limited night-time left us with very little to talk about, so it wasn't as difficult as I initially feared. We were also asked to promote the dark skies park in our presentations, which was a reasonable request really.

The planetarium, and our poster display, all set up and ready to go. (Credit: David Brown)

I knew that I'd never be able to run all four days, from 9:30 to 17:00 solid, all by myself, so I got some other volunteers from work who wanted to get involved. Whilst I was away enjoying the racing at Le Mans they were hard at work producing uniform t-shirts, and a variety of posters to display. They did a brilliant job, and all I had to do when i got back was drive them around and take some of the shows.

A lot of driving there was too! The marquee was being built from scratch, and the planetarium took up a significant amount of space, so we travelled down on Tuesday afternoon to set everything up. We then travelled down again on Wednesday to show some of the other partners in the marquee the presentation, and to discuss what would be happening during the actual show. We then travelled backwards and forwards from St Andrews for all four days.

The planetarium presentations themselves generally went very well. We were late arriving on the first day owing to the horrendous traffic (I'd allocated more time than normal to get there, but not enough for the time we left St Andrews), so the first school group didn't get a show, but after that it went smoothly. Some of the school groups didn't show up, which was irritating, but we just gave more shows to the public.

A pile of muddy boots outside the planetarium. This was one of the busiest shows we gave to the public all weekend (Credit: David Brown)

Over the weekend we found that we were running through the shows very quickly, so dropped them to every 20 minutes. We were never full, but we did get a big rush of people every now and then when a severe rainstorm passed overhead. We were making everyone take their boots off as well, in a vain effort to avoid getting too much mud inside the dome. On the whole everyone was well behaved, but there were a lot of children who got bored because they couldn't see anything straight away, and so left the dome part way through, and more who kept going up and down the entrance tunnel, and so didn't see anything because their eyes never adjusted. There were still more who were rude, chatting all the way through, moving around the dome, and disrupting it for everyone else. But the majority of people enjoyed the experience.

The weather though, was atrocious for the whole week. By Sunday it was getting better, but there were frequent downpours which turned the car park into a sea of mud. On Thursday we were close to getting stuck trying to get out, and there were many more unfortunate people who did have to get pulled out by tractors. The rest of the time we parked right next to the road! The weather had an impact on visitor numbers as well, as all of the staff that I talked to who'd been before said it was quieter than in previous years. The traffic too was terrible the first day, but got better as the show went on. Two hours to get from the airport across the Forth bridge on Thursday was a joke, but by far the worst that the traffic got.

It got very wet on Friday, and the drainage around some of the rounds was overwhelmed very quickly! (Credit: David Brown)

Overall it was an enjoyable, but exhausting experience. I certainly don't regret taking part. But next time I'd try and see about staying nearby for the duration to save having to drive for an hour and half each way every day. I'd also be more defensive about the school groups. I was clear that we couldn't accommodate wheelchairs, but the first group still showed up with two of them, and we were put under pressure to take bigger groups than we cold really handle, which I would try to avoid in the future.

We did get to wander around the rest of the show after we finished each day, as our marquee closed at 17:00 whereas the main show continued until 20:00 or so. There was lots to see, so I've included some pictures below to give some idea of what was going on.