Whether it’s a fine May morning or a slow September sunset, the light from the Sun is always clear and steady. But we’re 93 million miles away, and closer up, the situation is very different. The surface seethes with fire, in a cauldron of solar storms, with great looping flares that could contain up to ten planets like ours in a line.

To picture this, it takes the combined efforts of an artist and solar physicist. Alex Rinsler is known for his large scale and outdoor work and has presented sculptural works in cities around the world. Robert Walsh is professor of solar physics at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN), and involved in a wide range of actitivies. He was part of the NASA 2017 eclipse and in 2019 engaged over ten thousand young people in the UK-wide exoplanet naming competition. He has also co-authored a popular science book for teenagers, Unmasked: The Science of Superheroes. He spoke earlier this year about his work in an interview with the Awesome Astronomy website.

The result is a miniature Sun – a 6-metre-diameter sphere with imagery of light and movement from the actual Sun’s surface pouring from it. The imagery comes from NASA spacecraft, with two week’s film speeded up into a 12-minute sequence so that you see the storms and flares in dynamic action.

The Sun will be suspended in the Cathedral crossing, and you’ll see it from a distance when you enter through the west door, and then be able to come right underneath it and see the surface come alive. There’s music as well, and information from either Robert Walsh himself or one of a team of helpers which includes three PhD students from the university and astronomers from Caithness and Orkney.

Wwetaher permitting there may be a solar telescope set up outside, and on Monday 11th there are two workshops with Callum Potter, former president of the British Astronomical Association, one on how to observe the sun safely and the other on how to become an amateur astronomer.

And from the Sun in the Cathedral it’s possible to move out among the planets in the Solar System – located in various Kirkwall business premises. At each one you get a clue to where to find the next one, along with a letter of the alphabet – and when you have all the letter you’ll be able to make them into three words and enter the competition with several prizes. You can find more details here and download information here.

There are two concerts in the Cathedral with the Sun installation as backdrop. One features the ethereal combination of electronic music with voices, instruments and the Cathedral organ – that’s Rivers of Running Gold. The Sun, the Sun! on the evening of Sunday 10th. And on Wednesday 13th, you can join some of Orkney’s musicians, singers, storytellers and poets in rounding off the Sun’s seven-day visit with a warm au revoir in Sundown.

Founded in 1137, it was called ‘The Light in the North’ and it exemplifies the way in which medieval cathedrals were built to enable light to shine through them, where we enter from west and make our way to the east and the light of the rising sun.

Its bishops were often scholars, among them Robert Reid who had developed the Cistercian abbey of Kinloss into a centre of European scholarship. Reid was in contact with the work of the leading thinkers of the day in Europe, among them the remarkable Pico della Mirandola, who transformed the medieval worldview with a new image of humanity, not condemned by Adam’s sin but able to chose whether to sink into the mud or rise to hear the voices of the angels. That vision opened the way for the Renaissance, and for the reformation that followed and the birth of modern science. A book about Pico’s work had a dedication to Robert Reid, who built in Kirkwall the tower of the Bishop’s Palace and the houses for the clergy on Broad Street that form today’s Tankerness House and Orkney Museum.

After him came Adam Bothwell, a scholar too and a cousin of the Scottish mathematician John Napier, the inventor of logarithms. Then came the Reformation, much more smoothly in Orkney than elsewhere, with sweeping organisational reforms by Reid a notable factor.

After Bothwell there were no bishops for more than half a century, but then came George Graham, who built Skaill House, and who brother-in-law was the young scholar James Crichton, who in his short life blazed like a star with radical scholarship.

And later came Bishop Murdoch Mackenzie from Moray, whose grandson Murdoch Mackenzie, a student at Edinburgh of the great Scottish mathematician Colin MacLaurin, laid the foundations for modern mapmaking.

Nearly nine centuries on from its foundation, the Cathedral this year welcomes the Sun and everyone who comes to see it and take time to absorb the atmosphere of the building.

This offer has been made possible through generous support from: