Matthew Cross
Yo I'm Matthew!
I am 17 and study Geography, Chemistry, Biology and Classical civilisation at Dereham Sixth Form.
I been a member of the astronomy club since 2001, but I also enjoy cricket and play for Dereham - my local club. I have always liked astronomy and been interested in the stars and constellations.
I didn’t quite know what to expect when we went to South Africa . I was the leader of the spectrum group. On the first night in SA we put the final touches to the project and were pleased with the result.
Over the next few days we taught our spectrum project in five schools in the Cape Town townships. The children themselves wanted to learn as much as possible and were really interested. At one school in particular something struck us; we were in the library, but they had no books. These children had almost nothing compared to me, but were dressed very smartly (much better than in most English schools) and saw that education could give an escape route out of the townships.
Of the many experiments that we did, undoubtedly the best one was with UV beads. These react with the ultraviolet light from the sun to change from white to different colours. We gave them to the children, went outside, and the look of amazement on their faces when the beads changed colour was magical.
In the second week we went to Sutherland where the observatory was situated. We taught in both the secondary and primary school. In the primary school we had to make our presentation simple, so Dr Helen Mason came up with the idea of just focusing on the rainbow. This worked a treat and they had fun and learnt at the same time. By coincidence, there was a rainbow in Sutherland that morning, which we photographed.
At night, the sky was amazing. The Milky Way arched over us with many more objects to be seen through a telescope. I was also lucky enough to see many shooting stars. SALT (Southern African Large Telescope) was massive and it was really cool that we saw some of the first test images ever done by the telescope.
I just have to say a thank you to the sponsors for sponsoring us and for everyone who helped organise the project.
