Scientist Explores the Links Between the Night Sky and English Literature

David H. Levy, American comet discoverer, will be at the University of Birmingham on Monday 9th March to talk about 'Poetry of the Night: A marvellous union between science and literature'. David's talk will examine how, in October 1605, Londoners experienced an almost total eclipse of the Sun at around the same time that Shakespeare's King Lear was exploring humanity's relationship to the cosmos. 'These late eclipses in the Sun and Moon', a passage from the play, begins a sophisticated discussion of that relationship, based on real events in the night sky. In his lecture David will explore a number of examples of the richness of astronomical allusions in English literature. David is an author and broadcaster, as well as a scientist. He has discovered 22 comets, nine of them using his own backyard telescopes. He also helped to discover the comet that collided with Jupiter in 1994 - a collision which produced the most spectacular explosions ever witnessed in the solar system.