Past event
RASC Vancouver Monthly Meeting - at SFU Burnaby
About the event
Join us for our monthly meeting. All of our monthly meetings are free and open to the public.
Our guest will be joining us at SFU, so this lecture will be an in-person lecture.
Location: SFU Burnaby, room AQ3149
Topic: The Big Picture: A Filmmaker's Approach to the Universe
Abstract: Rob didn't set out to reinvent his imaging workflow. Digging back through years of backyard astronomy data, he noticed a pattern: the same targets, shot again and again through different telescopes at different focal lengths. To most astrophotographers, that's just a well-stocked archive. To someone who spent his career on film sets, it looked like a shot list; wide, medium, and close up, footage never cut together. That spark became a question: could this data be treated less like a stack of exposures and more like the shots of a movie, ready to be animated into motion? Chasing the answer turned Rob from astrophotographer into director. He engineered a multi-telescope optical array for his rooftop observatory built to capture that coverage, then extended his reach with remote telescopes at Starfront Observatories in Texas and KKRO in South Africa to pull in wide-field Milky Way data no Vancouver rooftop could ever see. He built an analog recording studio, and scores and mixes every sequence himself, shaping raw astronomical data into cinematic nebula fly-ins for a growing catalogue of educational astronomy videos. In this talk, Rob traces how that rooftop discovery grew into a purpose-built production pipeline, and what it's teaching him about the road ahead: fusing his years in film with a future in science communication, using the language of cinema to help audiences not just see the universe, but feel its scale.
Speaker: Rob Lyons
Bio: Rob Lyons began his career in film and television on the sets of Stargate Atlantis and SG-1, went on to produce media in-house at BC Children's Hospital, and later ran his own award-winning production company. Then the pandemic sent him to his rooftop with a telescope, and astrophotography took hold. Six years on, he's founded and chaired the RASC Vancouver Centre's Imaging program and now serves as an at-large director on council. His images have appeared in Sky & Telescope, BBC Sky at Night, Astronomy, SkyNews, and the Journal of the RASC, and have recently earned him a NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day. These days he's partway through a Space Studies degree with a concentration in astronomy, chasing a plan to fuse his two careers into a new astronomy media venture: Robservatory.
About our Events:
All RASC lectures and observing events are open to the public, family friendly, and there is no charge for admission. Our organization is run entirely by volunteers who love astronomy and astrophysics. Whether you're a complete beginner, a seasoned astronomer, or you hope to work for NASA some day, anyone fascinated by space exploration is welcome.
