Professor Mark McCaughrean, senior science adviser, European Space Agency One of the most fascinating space missions of our lifetime was explained in one of the Flamsteed’s most fascinating lectures. Report by Andy Sawers “Many younger people talked about this being their ‘Apollo moment’,” said Prof Mark McCaughrean as he started his talk on what he […]
We have come to expect Eddie’s talks to be well-researched, thorough, and challenging. This talk didn’t disappoint. As Eddie said in his introduction, this was not a talk about astronomy, it was about optics, and Eddie was on home ground – much of his professional career was in the field of optics. And 2015 has […]
Brian Blake kindly arranged for us to visit the impressive Royal Astronomical Society Library where we were met by librarian Sian Prosser. Sian gave us a short introductory talk about the RAS and its activities. The RAS was founded in 1820, partly in response to the tyrannical rule of Sir Joseph Banks over the Royal […]
Galactic Planetary Science: What we’re learning about exoplanets and their atmospheres Professor Giovanna Tinetti, professor of Physics and Astronomy at University College London It’s not very many years since the first discoveries of exoplanets, planets outside our own solar system, and yet today there is already some very impressive work being done to analyse the […]
Saturday the 10th was the date for our inaugural observing and imaging event under Chris Mann’s personal piece of Kent darkness and did not disappoint. The plan was to view, and hopefully capture, Comet 2014/Q2 Lovejoy. The Comet was ideally placed in the sky at just over 40 degrees altitude and due to cross the […]
Our scheduled observing session on the 19th coincided with a spell of clear skies that offered good seeing and a little bit of breeze to keep the dew away. Despite the best efforts of the Shard, which was lit up like the proverbial Christmas Tree. We were able to observe a selection of deep sky […]
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 […]
