March 2010
The skies cleared to give about a dozen astronomers, both novice and experienced, a good nights viewing. A wide range of objects viewed from Mars and Saturn to various Messier objects. In my case M31, M1, M64, some nice doubles and the double cluster as well.
For some it was their first view of Saturn, and as always got the "wow" response. For others it was a chance to try out their new equipment (in my case a Sky scout). Older hands lent their expertise to help out with issues such as alignment of finder scopes, mount axies (for those who had GEM) and finding objects for them to see. Thanks guys for helping out, it's partly what these sessions are all about.
On Saturday 13th March members of AAS setup a series of solar scopes on the front lawn of the Our Lady's Abingdon School along with assistance of two of the school's teachers. We had one hydrogen alpha PST scope, one calcium potassium scope and two white light scopes.
The morning started clear, and with an active sun we soon had large queues of students, parents and teachers waiting to have a look through all of the scopes . The range of scopes allowed everybody to compare and contrast the different views of our nearest star.
The Sun cooperated with some nice prominences and a decent sunspot group. A lucky few got to a particularly good prominence shoot out from the Sun.
Unfortunately we were cut short by about half an hour as the clouds began to roll in just after noon. So a few people had to leave disappointed but on the whole the morning was a great success. I think we shall be back to do a repeat later in the year.
January 2010
It wasn't a promising start to the evening with only the Moon visible through the clouds. But everybody perked up as Mars started to peak through the ever expanding gaps. In the end we had quite a good night with lots of lunar and martian views.
A highlight for me was helping one of our members view a crater that was originaly name after his grandfather (now Crater Macdonald). It was a bit tricky to find as it is only 8km across and there were few landmarks to guide us to it, but I think we got it in the end.
A few brave souls tried for M42 and succeeded in seeing the trapezium, but the nebula itself was hardly visible.
So despite a poor start we ended up with a successful evening with a good range of 'scopes present from a 12" dob to 6" SCTs and Newtonians.
November 2009
We had a reasonable nights observing for the November observing session despite the patchy skies. Members got to see M31, M15, M1, M57, M37, M38, Jupiter and Alberio. Unfortunately, none at high magnification thanks to a combination of wind and poor seeing. We also managed to get one member better acquainted with their scope.
On a less series note I discovered that between them society members now have one of each kind of scope (i.e. refractor, newtonian & SCT) using Celestron's goto mount. And we're agreed that the skyalign feature is not much good, but the basic 2 star alignment works well.
Mr Kim Ward is head of the Space Engineering and Technology Division at Rutherford Appleton Labs, and his talk was about RAL’s involvement in designing and building scientific instruments to be carried on craft in Earth orbit and beyond.
He gave a very detailed account of all the variables that have to be borne in mind when sending an instrument package into space:
- The location of any space junk that might cause damage.
- Is the Sun very active? Will its radiation damage equipment? Did you know in 1972, in the period between the Apollo 16 and 17 missions, there was a long spell of high solar activity that would have killed any crew who went up at that time? Not that we knew at that time.
- Small is best. Minimise everything and mill out holes in any aluminium or carbon fibre structures in order to reduce weight.
- Power expenditure needs to be kept as low as possible. Mobile phone technology has helped a lot with this.
- How do the materials react to a vacuum or high ultraviolet radiation? Certain plastics and lubrications can emit gases which could damage optics or machinery.
Christopher Taylor owns the ground and has some good connections when it comes to getting grants for public equipment. He got some commercial telescopes and wants to use CCDs on them but the location is dubious in its suitability (as well as there being no power source anyway). Bob amused us with lots of slides of trees blocking the views and the small bit of southern view he did find will give you superb views of Banbury’s light pollution, two miles south….- that’s if you haven’t fallen down one of the banks by the path in your half mile walk from the car park. Well done Bob for surviving to tell the tale.
October 2009
We have a brand new acquisition for our library, namely ‘Fred Hoyle’s Universe’, a very impressive tome donated kindly by our last guest speaker, Dr Jane Gregory of University College London.
Her talk was based on her biography of him, but what he achieved is way beyond the scope of just one evening’s talk. It seems he was quite a quiet rebel from even his early days as a schoolboy in Yorkshire, when he used to skive off from school and spend his time reading up on astronomy in the local library. Grammar school and Cambridge University (1936) followed and he was still a poor attendee, especially when he found out that his heroes Arthur Eddington and Ernest Rutherford were rather disappointing in real life.
It says a lot about the man that he still managed to graduate and went into radar development when war broke out. He ended up in the USA looking at radar installations but again got into trouble for gallivanting around astronomical observatories instead.
He later came back as a lecturer in Cambridge and got into research on how the heavy elements could be formed in the universe. He believed in a steady state continuous creation, and he himself coined the name ‘Big Bang’ for the theory that had been put forward by the American George Gamow in 1946, namely that the universe had a sudden and explosive birth. Hoyle was actually being derogatory, as he thought that had to be nonsense!
The later part of Hoyle’s life is quite intriguing:
- His BBC radio series on the nature of the universe earned him the 1950 title of radio broadcaster of the year.
- In 1965 he set up an Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge in order to stop people from wanting to go abroad (yes, the ‘brain drain’ was a worry in those days too). And the radio evidence from that time (Penzias and Wilson’s famous cosmic microwave background) from that time, made him accept that the Big Bang theory was probably correct.
- In the mid-1970s he joined forces with Chandra Wickramasinghe with theories on the building blocks of life originating in space dust. (‘Lifecloud’ 1978)
- Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was knighted in 1972. He also wrote a lot of fiction, the first of his books being ‘The Black Cloud’ (1957).
Abingdon Astronomical Society helps out at Larkmead School's open evening.
Larkmead school held their open evening for prospective pupils and their parents on the 8th October this year. As part of the IYA2009 the school has received a telescope from the SPA and they invited AAS to come along and help them set it up and show prospective pupils what could be seen through the scope. AAS members Chris Holt, Owen Brazell and Ian Smith attended.
The scope turned out to be a 70mm refractor on a simple Alt/Az mount. It was setup between the music block and the science block so with all the lighting around not a lot could be seen! However we pointed it at Jupiter and spent the next 2 hours showing the planet off to the students. There we're lots of oohs and aahs and "cool" as this was the first time many had had a chance to look through a telescope.
We had a steady stream of pupils and parents. My particular favourite was when a little girl, who'd hadn't had any success with telescopes before, suddenly saw Jupiter and 3 of its moons. Overall a successful evening.
September 2009
Grant Privett lives in Wiltshire but still associates himself with Shropshire AS, and his own title to his talk sounds much better than what we put in the programme: “Going deep, or, in pursuit of the stupidly dim”. In other words, imaging deep deep-sky objects.
He is not ashamed of admitting that he likes the thrill of the chase – he chooses the deepest deep sky objects because (in his words) everyone’s done the bright ones and someone can always do them better than you anyway.
He then goes into how to do it:
- Keep your equipment simple – telescope easy to stabilize and align. You don’t need fancy optics, as the dimmest objects don’t need better than one quarter wavelength.
- Chair and small chart table. Lots of insulation layers and cavity soled shoes essential. [Ed. Anyone heard of cavity sole insulation?]
- Watch out for stray lighting. Keep 90 to 120 degrees away from the Moon and other lighting, which can get into the scope otherwise, sometimes through the focuser. (Even reflections off phone lines can intrude – he’s getting really serious here!)
- Keep the optics clean and well-collimated.
He then discussed actual picture taking and stacking images in order to remove background noise. Pixel mapping removes the effects of dud pixels on your CCD screen. Grant recommends stacking at least around 100 images to get the best noise cancellation. He admits to stacking 1600 images once (sadly he didn’t say on what).
He uses a 250mm reflector and regularly gets down to 20th mag. One of his shots was of dwarf galaxy Leo 1, whose brightest star is 18thmag. Another favourite of his is Gyulbudaghian’s variable nebula, not just because he likes the name, but because you can see the nebula change from week to week. (I googled it and it belongs to the very young variable PV Cep.). He has also imaged dwarf planet Eris (UB313, 19th mag).
Just like a typical adrenaline junkie, he is never satisfied, and one day he hopes to get down to 23rd mag, because that was the limiting magnitude of the great Mount Palomar telescope.
April 2009
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2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, held to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Galileo's use of a telescope to study the night sky. As part of the celebration, Abingdon Astronomical Society held a free solar viewing day in conjunction with the Museum of the History of Science. Society members set up telescopes outside the Sheldonian Theatre, in Broad St, Oxford, between 12pm and 3pm on Saturday 4th April 2009 so that the public could safely view the Sun and see dark spots on its surface, known as sunspots, and huge flares, known as prominences, ripping off the edge of the Sun. In the evening Sunningwell Village Hall, just outside Oxford, was the venue for a talk about the Moon and a chance to view it through society telescopes. Read more about our Solar Viewing and Moonwatch events and see pictures here. Both events were well-attended by locals and tourists alike. Actually it is a little-known fact that it was Oxford’s own Thomas Harriot who made the first drawing of the Moon through a telescope in July 1609 several months earlier than Galileo. |
August 2007
Several society members attended the Blewbury Show and took along telescopes to gives attendees views of the Sun, Moon and Mars.
July 2006
April 2005
14-17 October 2004
26 June 2004
8 June 2004
3 September 2003
31 August 2003
8 February 2003
