Archive For The “Uncategorized” Category
Astronomy is a wonderful hobby/interest/profession. It is often tempting to rush out and buy a telescope and just look up to see a bounteous sky full of amazing images like the ones taken from the Hubble Space Telescope. But Space is big. Mindbogglingly big. So like finding a needle in a proverbial haystack, you’re going…
If at 17 I just gave you a set of car keys for the first time and expected you to 1) get where you wanted to go and 2) return the car in one piece, you might think I’m batty. So why would you expect anything different with a telescope? It’s complicated mirrors and lens,…
Look to the North late on 3rd January into the early hours of the 4th to see one of the most prolific meteor showers of the year. The Quadrantids, named after the now defunct constellation of Quadrans Muralis, can give rise to 30+ meteors and hour and perhaps more with this month’s favourable Moon. The…
William Herschel Society lecture by Dr Lee Macdonald on Thursday 1 February 2018 @ 7.30 pm in BRLSI. He is the Research Facilitator at the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford. Summary: Originally built in 1769 to enable King George III to observe that year’s transit of Venus, Kew Observatory became one of the…
Finding Messier objects in the night sky can be quite tough especially if your skies aren’t particularly dark or you don’t have a well aligned Goto telescope mount. For each of the 110 Messier objects, we used Stellarium software to plot charts of how to find them and save them in negative format. The upper…