Planet Hunters NGTS: NI Science Festival

Last week was the Northern Ireland Science Festival, which aims to promote all kinds of science being done across the country and beyond! Since Planet Hunters NGTS is run primarily by researchers at Queen’s University Belfast, we, along with colleagues across the Astrophysics Research Centre, decided we’d get involved by making some videos to excite people about astronomy and hopefully try to teach some real science along the way.

Always looking for ways to promote Planet Hunters NGTS and get more people involved with hunting for exoplanets, we saw this as the perfect opportunity to advertise the project, and what better way to do so than to film a fast-talking, used-car salesman-style infomercial including some whacky special effects. You can watch the minute-long clip on YouTube here!

But that’s not all, Planet Hunters NGTS also became the sponsor of the fictitious Astro News Bulletin. The science is real and the bad jokes are sadly real, but you won’t find these newscaster on any mainstream channel.

There are 8 other excellent videos from members of the Astrophysics Research Centre to watch by following the link to the playlist here. Take a tour of some exoplanets; bake a comet; or see what it is us astronomers do all day!