A Talk from the Moon Lady

I always try to get to see something at the Winter Festival, and my choice this year was Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who was talking about the Moon.
I hadn't been to the Festival tent before - I thought it was just an auditorium, but there was a whole mini Festival space in the first tent, with the auditorium behind it. There was a bar, coffee bar (with recycleable cups), art exhibition with pictures of horses, wild wreaths made locally, and a book shelf and signing table, with space for a signing queue, at the far end.

The speaker probably should have been in bed - she was still wearing a hospital wristband from earlier in the week - but she gave an enthusiastic and fascinating talk, interspersed with TV clips so she didn't have to talk all the time. She was wearing a rather wonderful dark blue dress, with a pattern of the faces of the moon on it.
She's a co-presenter of The Sky at Night, so it's no surprise that one of her astronomer heroes is Sir Patrick Moore, whose maps of the surface of the moon were so good they were used by the Russians during the Space Race.
She spoke of the moon as a family heirloom, lighting her father's way home from school on his bike across the plains of Africa, and fascinating her as a child through the street lights and cloudy skies of London - and it's a love of the moon she is trying to pass on to her own daughter, who is now eight years old and was sitting in the audience with her dad.
She talked about the importance of the moon to the earth, deflecting meteor strikes, controlling the tides and possibly even causing the creation of RNA (the ancestor of DNA) in tidal rock pools, thus creating life, and all of us. There was a clip of her in a helicopter in Arizona, circling a crater, and another of her in a boat going through a rip tide in Scotland, from a documentary she made about eight years ago. She got the email about the documentary about two days after her daughter was born, and her husband had to go along on location to look after the baby (by then about four months old).
There was another film clip of her explaining how eclipses worked to Jeremy Paxman, and actually getting him to sound quite impressed. On stage, she demonstrated the tidally locked moon with a plushy toy that she waved around, its face always towards her.
She also talked about the history of observations of the moon, from the earliest observatory discovered recently in Scotland, formed of pits that corresponded with the phases of the moon as observed from that cliff top, 10,000 years ago.
Then there was En-hedu-ana, Astronomer Priestess of the Moon Goddess in Ur about 4,000 years ago. Hers is the first female name recorded in history, and she is also the first poet known by name - she wrote poems about the moon, of course, and also ran the temple. Maggie Aderin-Pocock said that she was aiming for a similar official title, but Astronomer Priestess of the Moon Goddess of Guildford didn't quite have the same ring to it!
When she was asked to write the Sky at Night guide to the Moon, her first reaction was terror. Although she's a serious scientist as well as TV presenter, she's dyslexic, so writing a book was a difficult task for her.
I bought the book, of course.