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World Space Week
“Vincere Ad Astra” — “To conquer to the stars.”
World Space Week, celebrated October 4–10, looks both outward to the possibilities of space and forward to the technologies, skills, and ideas that will carry humanity there. Scotland has a particularly fitting place in that story, with its long heritage of engineering, invention, scientific inquiry, and entrepreneurship now finding new expression in the growing space sector.
This tartan is a symmetrical version of Vincere Ad Astra, inspired by Legatum—Latin for “legacy.” Its name Vincere Ad Astra carries the wonderfully appropriate sense of striving or conquering “to the stars.”
The colours are a distinctly modern space-age palette. Purple represents Scotland’s engineering and entrepreneurial heritage and the accumulated expertise now being carried into new domains; green represents sustainable stewardship and the human-centred responsibility that keeps activity in space grounded in its consequences on Earth. Light purple represents cybersecurity, leadership, and diplomacy reimagined for the space age, while yellow, standing for gold, represents leadership intelligence. White signifies integrity, and black represents space itself—the vast background against which all those threads of knowledge, responsibility, ingenuity, and ambition come together.
It is a tartan about inheritance, but also about what is done with that inheritance: carrying a legacy forward, quite literally, toward the stars.🖤 💙 💜 🤍 💚 💛 🚀 ✨ 🛰️
Scotland after dark has a landscape all its own. Far from the glow of its cities, the Highlands, islands and great stretches of southern forest offer some of the darkest skies in Europe. On a clear, moonless night, the Milky Way can appear as a luminous band overhead, with familiar constellations surrounded by thousands of stars normally lost to artificial light. Autumn and winter are particularly rewarding, when Scotland’s long nights provide hours for stargazing—and, with a little luck and the right solar conditions, the aurora borealis may add green, violet and sometimes crimson light to the northern horizon.
One of the most celebrated places is Galloway Forest Park in southwest Scotland, designated an International Dark Sky Park in 2009 and the first of its kind in the UK. Its forests, lochs and sparsely populated hills create remarkably dark viewing conditions; on a clear night, more than 7,000 stars and planets may be visible to the naked eye, with the Milky Way readily apparent. Clatteringshaws Loch, Glentrool and Kirroughtree are among its favored stargazing locations. Nearby Moffat has taken a different approach to preserving the heavens: special street lighting helped it become an internationally recognized Dark Sky Community, demonstrating that even a town can deliberately protect the night above it.
Scotland’s islands provide still more extraordinary darkness. The Isle of Coll in the Inner Hebrides is an International Dark Sky Community, while the tiny Isle of Rum was designated Scotland’s first International Dark Sky Sanctuary in 2024. Eigg, Canna and North Ronaldsay also offer exceptionally dark skies, and farther inland the Tomintoul and Glenlivet area of the Cairngorms has become another important centre for dark-sky tourism and astronomy events. These are places where stargazing needs very little equipment: sometimes the finest observatory is simply a quiet hillside, a loch shore and an unobstructed Scottish sky.
Scotland also has a distinguished tradition of public astronomy. Mills Observatory in Dundee, opened in 1935, was Britain’s first purpose-built public observatory and still allows visitors to encounter the night sky through a traditional observatory setting. Together with Scotland’s modern dark-sky parks and communities, it reflects something rather lovely: in a country famous for dramatic landscapes, some of the finest scenery begins only after the landscape itself has disappeared into darkness.