The Isle of Wight’s first ever Dark Skies Festival, funded through the Isle of Wight Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) in partnership with New Carnival, has been hailed a resounding success with over 1,000 people attending the 2-day event.
New Carnival organised the new event, which took place on Friday 17th and Saturday 18th February at Isle of Wight Pearl, with the aim of celebrating and raising awareness of the fantastic dark skies of the Isle of Wight. The festival was put on to support the Island’s application to become an internationally officially recognised ‘Dark Skies Park’.
Talks, presentations, workshops, art, film, and performance were on offer all for free.
Hannah Ray, Director of New Carnival, has said:
“We have been overwhelmed by the popularity of this event and the appetite of the public to find out more about the Island’s unique dark skies. Support from so many local organisations and individuals helped to make the event a tremendous success”.
Richard Grogan of the Isle of Wight AONB adds:
“The Isle of Wight AONB was very pleased to support this event through the UNESCO Site Across the Channel Project and we hope that everyone enjoyed themselves over this fantastic weekend. Many thanks to the New Carnival Company and all performers and volunteers and we wish the Isle of Wight Council luck with their bid to the International Dark Skies Association to designate this part of the IW as a Dark Skies area”.
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New Carnival prioritises working with children and young people. For this festival, they worked with the Isle of Wight College’s Art and Design students who created large willow nocturnal animals and also created individual fine art pieces as part of their coursework on the theme of ‘Dark Skies’.
Students from Years 5 and 6 at Broadlea Primary School worked with the Wight Aviation Museum to find out about the Black Arrow project, where rockets were designed, built and tested on the Isle of Wight in the 1960s and 70s. They created junk model rockets with New Carnival artist Gemma Mallinson.
Pupils from Fiveways created neon artworks representing spacecraft using glow in the dark tape as well as a series of photo booth props representing the solar system.
Young emerging artists showcased their talents; Alicia French ran workshops making clay asteroids, ‘Stixguy’ Kai Davis performed a light show with his circus skills, Storyteller Corey Gibbs told stories of the stars and Eloise Preston ran a creative writing session.
What exactly are the AONB doing to protect the West Wight area of Dark Skies from massive lights at Tapnell Farm shining all night?
Dark skies??? What a joke. Those abominations perched on top of Asda lighting the night sky are a complete eyesore. And even more lights are planned to go on when the latest unwanted units are built opposite. The Isle of Wight council don’t give a damn about so called “Dark Skies”. They would prefer a Las Vegas night sky.
I was the first, but it has been removed?????