StarLight exhibit brings big data down to Earth

Imperial's main entrance on Exhibition Road will be illuminated this week with an installation based on data from the Kepler space observatory. Kepler was launched by NASA in 2009 to discover habitable planets by studying the flickering and pulsing of light from stars in our galaxy the Milky Way. Now Imperial alumnus Jon Rogers and colleagues are using this data to control the brightness of a series of light bulbs to create a light sculpture they call StarLight. Currently a Senior Lecturer in Product Design at the University of Dundee, Rogers completed a PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial in 2001. "We want to give people a physical representation of the story of the exploration of space through light," he said. "We think it's really important that complex problems in science are made more tangible and accessible in ordinary formats." The exhibit is an installation made up of 12 coloured lights. Each one is controlled by a different stream of data.