We Are Astronomers Competition

20 May 2009

To celebrate the launch of the amazing new full-dome digital planetarium show, "We Are Astronomers", you have the chance to win four free tickets to see the show at the nearest planetarium to you (to see where the show is playing, visit our "We Are Astronomers" page) along with an exclusive poster signed by the show's narrator, David Tennant. (Please note that this competition is only open to residents in the UK).

So what do you have to do to win this excellent prize? It's quite simple; write us a twitter astronomy haiku!

If you're not familiar with Twitter, you'll have to create a twitter account for yourself at http://twitter.com (it's free).

Once you have done that, follow us @astronomy2009uk and @astronomy2009, which will keep you up-to-date will everything that's happening in the UK during IYA2009.

Then you have to get creative and write your astronomy haiku! A haiku is a short poem of three lines, which follows a specific structure, so that the first line has five syllables, the second line has seven, and the third line has five. The lines needn't necessarily rhyme (in fact they rarely do). An example haiku (taken from the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today forum) is:

Is that all you see?
In a tiny speck of dust
A whole Universe!

[Arneb, 2006]

Once you've written your haiku, send it via twitter, with @astronomy2009uk at the start of your tweet, and with a " / " separating each of the three lines of your haiku. i.e.:

"@astronomy2009uk: Is that all you see? / In a tiny speck of dust / A whole Universe!"

As you can see, haiku are well suited to Twitter, which restricts you to 140 characters per tweet.

The entries will be judged by the UK IYA2009 steering group, and the best three will be tweeted on the @astronomy2009uk and @astronomy2009 feeds. The winning entry will be sent the signed poster along with tickets to their nearest planetarium.

The winner will be announced on 01 June 2009, so get your thinking caps on!

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