Lough Gur continues to look to the skies and today releases 31 months of data spanning the time period from April 2016 to November 2018. Lough Gur is not only the location of Ireland’s oldest and largest stone circle, but also tells the story of the pre-Celtic settlers who first came to the area over 6,000 years ago and continues to the present day in the people who still dwell and farm in the locality.
The Dark Sky project is a significant undertaking by the Lough Gur group to secure International Dark Sky Association status for Lough Gur. But more important than being able to claim international status is the import task of preserving, not just the physical sites around Lough Gur, but the night skies overhead which has been available to man, woman and child at Lough Gur for over 6000 years. As such we have embarked on a scientific measurement of how dark our skies are throughout the year and making that information readily available to you our visitors to Lough Gur.
As a community project, the data sky data is freely available to the public to view and analyse with our online offering and also to download for offline analysis.
Click here to explore our data, tutorials and various areas of the Dark Sky Project.
A Living Workshop & Fieldsite
Each year Lough Gur welcomes schools and students to visit this ancient site, to experience first hand the culture, history and science of the Great Stone Circle and surrounding sites.
With our online data students, classes and teachers can now be part of the learning experience that is Dark Skies, right from their desks and classrooms. The data from Lough Gur has applications across multiple disciplines including physics, astronomy, archeoastronomy, math, archeology, natural sciences and so much more. If you are interested in learning more or interested in visiting Lough Gur please reach out to the Lough Gur team via our contact page.