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 […]
by Mike Meynell The autumn equinox is on September 23 – the point where the hours of night and day are equal, so we’re looking forward to the skies getting darker again. I’m going to cover the Moon and the planets and then move on to some of the other objects that you can view […]
At our last Flamsteed committee meeting in May, Nick Phillips proposed that we set up a series of “members only” solar viewing events at the Royal Observatory Greenwich to take advantage of the equipment that we have available and to promote interest in solar observing amongst the Flamsteed membership. We’ve been running public sessions at […]
Report by Andy Sawers As the dawn chorus gave way to the sound of the school run, it still wasn’t at all obvious that we were going to have a good solar viewing day. The clouds weren’t great and the forecast wasn’t much better. Still, perhaps we’d get a couple of hours of showing and […]
Report by Mike Meynell In truth, the Flamsteed don’t need much of an excuse to organise a trip to Herstmonceux, the second home of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. However, it was a bit of a surprise to find that it had been 6 years since our last visit, back in June 2008. It was the […]
