Flamsteed Astronomy Society

On a somewhat cold and blustery morning, ten eager individuals gathered in The Endeavour Room at the Royal Observatory Greenwich for what proved to be another very productive session, which began fairly promptly at 11.30am. Some of us had arrived an hour earlier to transport our motorised HEQ5 mount and tripod together with other equipment […]

I would like to thank all those who made it to the Ashburmham Arms last Wednesday the 10th October. I hope you had an enjoyable evening, we certainly achieved a lot in such a short time. For those of you who were unable to attend, here is a brief account. Mike Meynell arrived shortly after me […]

For our first lecture of the 2012/13 season, the Flamsteed were delighted to welcome Dr Radmila Topalovic of the Royal Observatory Greenwich. Though Radmila had never lectured to us before, she was well known to many Flamsteed members, both through her work at the ROG and as tutor of the GCSE Astronomy course. Radmila’s energetic […]

81 members of the Flamsteed Astronomy Society gathered in the lecture theatre of the National Maritime Museum for our 13th Annual General Meeting, to be followed by a lecture from Dr Radmila Topalovic of the Royal Observatory Greenwich. Lin Potter, in her last address as chair of the society after 9 years at the helm, […]

While most people watched Tom Daley win Olympic Bronze for Great Britain in the 10 meter diving event, a remarkable achievement, seventeen souls gathered under a cloudy sky on a dark site in Kent. Mike Meynell and I had studied weather maps and with conditions set to worsen on Sunday, we decided to give the […]

The last meeting of the season With Greenwich moving into Olympic mode, but at the same time, many exciting things taking place such as the Royal River exhibition in the National Maritime Museum, this was a special meeting with three talks given by Flamsteed members as follows:-   The Great Melbourne Telescope by Mike Dryland […]

Around 140 people gathered on Blackheath at 4.30am on the morning of 6 June 2012 to observe The Transit of Venus. With a thick bank of billowing slate grey cloud to the east, it was not a promising start. Never one to be put off, I unpacked the car which was loaded with Coronado telescopes […]

Stuart and Chris enjoy a joke during the debate   In front of a packed audience, we were delighted to welcome back two old friends of the society, Dr Chris Lintott and Dr Stuart Clark, for a debate on Dark Matter. Dr Marek Kukula of the Royal Observatory Greenwich, in his second consecutive Flamsteed appearance, […]

Marek Kukula is the Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.  His speciality research subjects were the study of super-massive black holes and the evolution of galaxies. The first point that Marek made was that the ancient astronomers did not have the problem that we have today of light pollution.  The blaze of stars over […]

The Flamsteed were in the unusual position of having a Friday evening lecture, rather than our usual Monday evening slot. This was so that we could welcome back Nick Kanas, who made a stop off in London to visit us, on his way home from Paris to San Francisco. Nick is professor of psychiatry at […]