Meet the authors of the ‘Very Short Introduction’ series of books. This is a free, drop-in event, but it helps us if you register your interest by booking a free ticket.

Modern materials and computer technology allow telescopes to range from large Earth-based optical telescopes and radio arrays linking up across continents, to space-based telescopes capturing the Universe in infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays. Discover how all of them peer back in time and owe their development to Galileo’s observations of the familiar moons of Earth and Jupiter.

Suitable for age 14+

Geoff Cottrell is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. He began his career as a radio astronomer at Cambridge, observing colliding galaxies, and later worked on magnetically confined plasmas that are hotter than the centre of the Sun.