You will probably have heard of the Hubble Space Telescope. It has orbited our planet 333 miles up since 1990 and has spectacularly opened up our view of the Universe with many beautiful images and discoveries. It was named after the American astronomer Edwin Hubble. He fought in the Great War and when he returned in 1919, Hubble joined the Mount Wilson Observatory with its 100-inch mirror Hooker Telescope that was the most powerful…
Next Meeting: March 21st – Summercourt
Image Credit: US Airforce Dan’s talk will be on Aurora. He will start with what the aurora actually are , i.e. the reactions with charged particles with different elements in the atmosphere and how the magnetosphere channels them. He’ll then move onto solar events that release them and why they like equinoxes. He’ll also describe how other phenomena, that look like aurora, are formed. We meet at 19:00 for a 19:30 kickoff
Largest Sunspot Group of Cycle 25
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…
Pixinsight Workshop: 17, February
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…
March 7th: Trevarrian
This evening will be a Solar Observing hands on practical for using and making equipment to prepare for what will hopefully be an increased Solar activity during 2024 and beyond. Also, our resident Solar imaging wizzo, Nigel will show how he processes his wonderful Hα solar images. Meet 19:00 for a 19:30 kick off.
Cornish John finds Ice Giant 2
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…