Light Gallery

Jubilee Procession in a Cornish Village, A.G. Sherwood Hunter (1846-1919)

Oil on canvas, Newlyn School, June 1897. This painting is a wonderful record of a lantern procession held to commemorate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The women and girls in the procession, all dressed in white and carrying Chinese lanterns, are shown snaking their way through the Cornish fishing village of Newlyn. George Sherwood Hunter was born in Aberdeen and visited Newlyn around the turn of the century. He settled there permanently in 1902 where he taught alongside Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes at the Newlyn School of Painting. Like many artists associated with the Newlyn School, Hunter was interested in depicting working people around the ports and villages of Cornwall. The painting underwent considerable conservation and restoration in 2010 which meant that, for the first time in over 100 years, the exquisitely painted faces of those in the procession could be seen in all their subtle glory. The delicate beauty in the children's faces is made more remarkable when one takes into consideration the very limited palette Hunter works with

© RIC, photographer Mike Searle

Europe at night

Europe at night, satellite image. North is at top. Yellow lights mark the major cities and population areas, showing a clearly delineated Mediterranean coast. To the south, the top of North Africa can be seen. This is a composite of images taken by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) in 2000

© PLANETOBSERVER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Northern lights

Northern lights. The Northern Lights are created as electrically charged particles from the Solar wind are pulled in toward the magnetic poles by the Earth's magnetic field. As these particles collide with the atoms of gas in the ionosphere about 80km above the ground, they give the atoms energy and they become excited'. The atoms spontaneously release this energy in discrete amounts, resulting in particular colours of light being emitted. Photographed in the Swedish Arctic

© Jeremy Walker