Dr Darren Baskill

Site Updates

Follow-up materials from my public talks [updated: 3^rd October 2025].
Photos, videos & lectures from the March/April 2025 Hurtigruten Bergen-Kirkenes-Bergen Voyage along the Norwegian coast [updated: 6^th July 2025].
Photos & videos of the 8^th April 2024 Total Solar Eclipse [updated: 21^st February 2025].

A brief biography can be found below and on my career page.

Current positions:

Founder & organiser of Soapox Science Brighton
Co-founder of the Brighton Luminarium science centre concept
Trustee of the Ensonglopedia theatre charity
Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society
Member of the Institute of Physics, serving on the IOP South-Central Branch committee.

Previous jobs include:

Astronomer and educator at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, where I instigated the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition.
XMM-Newton Space Telescope Calibration Scientist (EPIC-MOS cameras) in the X-ray Astronomy Group of the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Leicester.

My selection of talks suitable for schools, colleges and the general poublic include:

Astrophotography - without a telescope!: Digital cameras, originally developed for astronomical research in the 1970's & 80's, are now commonplace. With immediate feedback allowing a rapid learning curve, what used to take weeks or even years of dedicated practice can now be done within an hour. And as software and digital technology continues to rapidly improve, getting great photographs of the night sky has never been easier. This talk includes plenty of ideas for astrophotography that you can try at home – without the need for a telescope. From the Moon to the Milky Way, and from shooting stars to star trails, the audience will leave with plenty of ideas on how to take great, original photographs of the night sky.
Observing the Hawaiian skies: The UK has access to large telescope facilities at the top of Mauna Kea in Hawai’i. This presentation is all about life as an astronomer, working nights at an altitude of over 4,000m!
The Aurora: The aurora, the dancing lights that illuminate up the night sky, is a wondrous sight that have been visible over Brighton several times in 2024/5 as the Sun went through a period of maximum activity. In this talk, we look at the science behind the lights to understand their shapes and colours, and look beyond Earth at the aurora on other planets - both within our solar system and beyond!
Brilliant Binaries!: Even though they just look like single stars to our eyes, half the stars in the night sky are actually in pairs - binary stars! This talk covers the weird and wonderful variety of binary star systems - including pairs that a so close together that they are tearing each other apart!
Observing the Invisible Infrared Universe, with the Webb Space Telescope: A talk about the Webb Space telescope, launched on Christmas Day 2021 as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and how the sky looks in infrared light.
X-treme Astronomy: The sky looks so peaceful on a clear dark night, but it is actually violent almost beyond comprehension - and that is revealed through observing the Universe with X-ray eyes. This talk looks at the field of X-ray astronomy, both the space telescopes we use to detect this highly energetic form of light, and about what we actually see.

And an appropriate brief biography to go with these talks...: Dr Darren Baskill has over 25 years of experience in astrophotography since studying astrophysics at the University of Leicester. He began using old-fashioned film and patience, and is now stunned on a regular basis at the sensitivity of modern digital cameras. Darren also initiated the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition when he worked at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and is now a lecturer at the University of Sussex in Brighton.