Amateur astronomy in Cheltenham, Gloucester and environs
The society had two evening observing events and a daytime event planned for the whole of the Saturday “Fun Day”.
Friday evening though looking promising proved to have no clear skies at all, and the Saturday forecast was not good. Many were awoken by the sound of thunder in the early morning, and torrential rain looked like it would spoil the day completely.
The winners of this years awards were announced at the May meeting of the Society.
Christine Beale was awarded the Robin Townley award for contribution to the work of the Society, and Peter Burgess won the Dan Turton trophy for his image of the Veil Nebula.
Congratulations to Christine and Peter.
The May/June issue of the society magazine Mercury is now available for members to download from the Members | Downloads page.
This months contents includes:
There is now a gallery showing the submissions for this years Dan Turton trophy competition for the best astro-image considering the equipment available for use.
You can view all the images here.
If you want to submit an image email Peter Cadogan & copy Callum Potter for the gallery.
If you yourself will not be attending the AGM, please check the web site before the 12th April and email Peter Cadogan your vote, so that it may be included in the count.
Prompted by the request from Peter for pictures to submit to the BBC One Show’s “Jupiter spot”, Les took a sequence of web cam images of Jupiter and its moons.
Les took video images every 20 mins or so from about 7:30 until midnight, and after processing composed this excellent animation.
Click on this picture for a bigger better view.
Note the movement of the Red Spot, and the satellites.
The March/April issue of the society magazine Mercury is now available for members to download from the Members | Downloads page.
This months contents includes:
Society member Rik McRae managed to capture the new supernova (now designated as 2014J) recently discovered in M82, through gaps in the cloud last night.
The supernova is quite bright, around magnitude 11.7 at discovery and may be brightening, before it will inevitably dim from view.
But it should be easy to see for at least the next couple of weeks – though a small telescope will probably be needed (6″ or more).
To find M82, you can use this useful finder chart from Astronomy Now, and read more about it here.
It’s with sadness to report that John Dobson passed away yesterday at the age of 98.
He invented the telescope design that became to be known as the Dobsonian – and was a leading light promoting observational astronomy to the general public with his Sidewalk Astronomy.
Always a keen visual observer, having said “I like to look at those photons with my own eyes, not on a picture or screen”.
Some of our longer term members might remember when John came to the society to give our 20th anniversary talk in 2002. You can read the Mercury following that visit by clicking on the cover pic below.
The January/February issue of the society magazine Mercury is now available for members to download from the Members | Downloads page.
This months contents includes:
As demonstrated at the CAS Xmas 2013 meeting, 100,000 Stars is an interactive visualization of our stellar neighbourhood created for the Google Chrome web browser. It shows the real location of over 100,000 nearby stars in 3D.
http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars/
Using this 3D map is a bit like using Google Maps. Zooming in reveals the major named stars and our solar system, with associated details.
Note: This does work (slower, with some colour issues etc.) in some other browsers, like Internet Explorer , but you really you need Google Chrome to run this visualisation at its best.
Interesting information on how it was built is at:
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/casestudies/100000stars/