Last month ( February) solar observers had a real treat observing the largest Sunspot group of the current solar cycle No25 . Peter Meadows of the BAA Solar section wrote “In addition to producing 3 X-flares over the last day or so, sunspot group AR 13590 is also the largest of this cycle so far. Today (23rd Feb) it reached an area of 1800 millionths of the Sun’s visible hemisphere (MSH). It is an…

It’s been a while since the club did an imaging workshop. Back then, no-one had ever heard of a CMOS sensor and all the big boy camera manufacturers like SBIG, Starlight Express, and Atik were only making huge pixeled mono only CCD sensors. The Skywatcher EQ5 mount was the imaging mount of choice – unless you could afford something from Software Bisque or Astrophysics. The tracking wasn’t great, so you had to use a…

JWST Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI Through his telescope In March 1781, the astronomer William Herschel noticed an object appearing as a disk and not a star and found it to be a new planet beyond the orbit of Saturn. He had discovered the Ice Giant planet Uranus which became the outermost of the seven known planets in our solar system.  Thirty seven years after Herschel’s discovery, poor tenant farmers Thomas and Tabitha Adams…