Cotswold Astronomical Society

On Monday 11th November there is a Transit of Mercury.  This begins at about 12.35 pm and is still in progress at Sunset.

Neil Havard is planning to observe this from the playing fields off Sappercombe Lane and would welcome any members and their friends who would like to come along to view the event – weather permitting. Sappercombe Lane is a narrow lane (just before Beeches Rd) off Little Herberts Rd that runs up from the church in Charlton Kings.  There is parking at the end of this short lane.  More telescopes would be welcomed of course, but ensure the correct filter is in place.

Editorial to appear in this month’s edition of Mercury, the newsletter of the Cotswold Astronomical Society.

It has become apparent that the number of people reading Mercury is not as high as  expected. The number of people who have registered on the website so far, which is required in order to view or download Mercury, is only about one third of the membership, so it really begs the question, are the majority of members really that interested? If you are reading this you are one of the minority who obviously are interested, so the committee will be promoting the availability of Mercury to everyone else. The use of email to reach members also doesn’t appear to be fully effective either. Statistics from the mailing system show that at best 80% of the emails are opened, the minimum being about 58%.

A lot of time and effort goes into creating Mercury, both from the people who contribute articles and then editing and publishing. It would therefore be more appreciated if the majority of members actually read it.

I have plans to help promote Mercury, to be implemented over the coming months. However, if you have any ideas you would like to share on what would make other members more interested in making the effort to read it, please let me know.

A talk at CAS by Pete Williamson.

On the club meeting night of the 12th October Pete gave his very interesting talk about the connections between astronomy and music. A prolific speaker at astronomy clubs the length and breadth of the country, Pete also runs SolarSphere, an astronomical and music festival, the next event being on the 14th to 17th August 2020 – http://solarsphere.events/

As all members should now know, the website has been reconfigured to make accessing all membership restricted areas simpler, with one password. To read Mercury and access the forums it will now be necessary to create an account. Your access request will be checked against the list of paid-up members and then confirmed. Please allow between 24 and 48 hours for this to be done as it is a manual process. However, it can usually be done within a few hours.

This year, on the 20th July 2019, it is the 50th anniversary of the first step on the moon, by Neil Armstrong.  This special edition of Mercury, with a printed copy made available to all CAS members who attend the next meeting, is devoted entirely to recognising and celebrating this amazing feat.

 We are on the cusp of the next steps in space exploration – it may be 50 years since the first landing, but many more achievements have been made since. Several lunar missions followed, unfortunately curtailed more by political expediency than lack of scientific will or progress, then many more space missions made possible by the Space Shuttle. This has benefited astronomy enormously, the shuttle being used to launch the Hubble telescope. The USA plans to return to the moon in 2024, with other countries such as China already landing probes and un-manned explorers this year.

 While there has been a lot of discussion about why we have not followed up on space travel by building a permanent moon base, which has fueled speculation and conspiracy theories galore, it is encouraging now to hear about governments and private organisations making plans for a permanent manned moon base within the next few years, rather than decades.

I therefore thought it fitting that we should dedicate this edition of Mercury to the moon landing and look forward with much hope to successfully reaching the other worlds of our solar system and eventually, other solar systems. Travelling to planets within our immediate vicinity takes long enough, 9 months one-way to Mars for example. The method of travel to other star systems is currently way beyond our technical capability, requiring either a method of near light-speed travel or some means of avoiding conventional light-speed limitations. How or when this can be achieved is still a huge speculation and could be yet hundreds or thousands of years in the future, if at all.

The articles that follow are a very small sample of some of the wealth of information publicly available about every aspect of the Apollo missions. Some links have been provided but a quick web search will find enough information to keep you reading for some considerable time.

Here’s to the next 50 years of space exploration – it should be an interesting time.