Lucie Green opened her session by saying how proud she was to be at UCL, because that was where the space research programme began back in the 1950s under Harrie Massey. He was politically-minded as well as scientifically-minded and managed to get hold of rockets that were redundant after WWII to use them for upper […]
We were a month late for Halloween but Tony Sizer nevertheless gave us a good scare with “Ghosts, poltergeists, and the Law of Gravity”. A cynic might say astronomers are easily deceived. It seems the case that some are a bit quick to see things they want to see, especially working at the edge of […]
Weather forecasting skills are almost as important as knowledge of the night sky when trying to practise astronomy in the UK. So it proved on Friday evening with our scheduled monthly observing evening on Blackheath. Despite Met Office claims that the skies would remain cloudy all evening, a study of the satellite data showed that […]
“We have one hour to cover thousands of years of astronomy,” said Heather Couper. She and Nigel Henbest did not fall short in that challenge. Report by Andy Sawers Nigel opened the talk with a much-loved if apocryphal 19th century anecdote about a lecture given by the Astronomer Royal of that day in which he […]
With the help of Bernard Bryant (Store Manager) and Louise Devoy (Curator of the ROG) we were able to take two dozen FAS members to see behind the scenes at Kidbrooke, a secure storage site not normally open to the public. Bernard greeted the group with a short history of the site (it began life […]
Well, you’ve got to love astronomy in the UK… don’t you?!… don’t you?!?!?!? A very frustrating couple of hours on Blackheath on Saturday evening. Nick and I had been discussing the weather for most of the day (in the absence of anything productive to do) and decided at 3pm that we would go ahead with […]
Ian Ridpath gave a lecture to the Flamsteed Astronomy Society on 13 October 2014. Andy Sawers summarises his fascinating talk. Making pictures and patterns out of the stars is the ultimate game of ‘Connect the dots’ – but where did the constellations we know today come from? This was the theme of the talk to […]
by Mike Meynell Once again, we’ll take a look at what to see in the sky over the coming month. First of all, there will be an occultation of Saturn by the Moon, just after 5pm on Saturday 25 October. From Greenwich, Saturn starts to disappear behind the Moon at about 16:05 GMT (17:05 BST) […]
The mainstay of our History Group programme has been the impressive knowledge and talent of our own members. Bill’s talk added significantly to this growing tradition – Bill has special insights into the history of the telegraph network, the ‘Victorian Internet’, and he linked these to the development of Longitude determination and the ties to […]
Dr Ali Mozaffari’s presentation on Testing Gravity in the Solar System was the opening event of the Flamsteed 2014-15 calendar – and it really raised the bar. But this being the Flamsteed Astronomy Society, many members leapt over that bar easily. In fact, Dr Mozaffari told us later how impressed he was by the quality […]
