The Big Draw – Seeing Closer

Description

This year’s Royal Society Big Draw event will celebrate the 350th anniversary of Micrographia, Robert Hooke’s seminal text of microscopic observations. This free, family-friendly day will feature talks, workshops and activities on the theme of microscopy.

Co-organised by the Making Visible project at CRASSH.

There will be further activities, including drawing lessons, making your own smartphone microscope, and screen-printing a personalised tote bag to take home. For enquiries contact events@royalsociety.org

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Talks  about the past and future of microscopic research

• Making Visible's Dr Felicity Henderson will be talking about A New Visible World: Robert Hooke’s Micrographia

• Professor David Klenerman, FRS, University of Cambridge, will be presenting Watching molecules: microscopy in the 21st century

• Dr Steven Lee, Royal Society Research Fellow, University of Cambridge, will be telling us about Drawing the inside of a single bacterium using super-resolution microscopy

These talks will be jargon-free and designed to be comprehensible to children as well as their parents and grandparents!

 

Hands-on observation and drawing with microscopes

A team from the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, led by Dr Hélène Doerflinger will be running  workshops for children to use microscopes, observe and draw some of the objects that Robert Hooke also observed. 

 

Exhibits

Illumina will be showing the latest scientific instrument used by modern scientists, while early historical microscopes and the first edition of the Micrographia may be found in the accompanying exhibition Seeing closer: 350 years of microscopy

 

Demonstration of Intaglio Techniques

Watch how the images for Hooke’s Micrographia were made – Ad Stijnman, printer and author of the definitive history of manual intaglio printmaking processes, Engraving and etching, 1400-2000 (London 2012), and a print-maker, will be demonstrating the steps involved in creating the images for Micrographia.

 

Robert Hooke's flea (© Royal Society)