Top tips to improve your viewing and astrophotography John Axtell is an experienced astrophotographer with his CV including writing for the Sky at Night magazine and running nearby Astronomy groups. Even so, he is not adverse to cheap and cheerful hacks to improve his viewing and photography, often using rather surprising items. In our January …
Category: Past Talks
A new look at three familiar features
A new look at three familiar features There are three features in the night sky which most people can recognise : the Plough, Orion’s Belt and the Pleiades. But what if you could look at them from a different viewing point or many years into the future? Would they still be so recognizable? FAS member …
The Winchcombe meteorite
Finding the Winchcombe meteorite It is the dream of every meteor-watcher to help retrieve a meteorite – ie a meteor which actually makes it all the way to the Earth’s surface. UKMON, a meteor-monitoring group set up by two Farnham Astronomical Society members, did just that in February 2021 playing an important role in locating …
The Discovery of Neptune
Who discovered Neptune? You might expect the answer to be a name, in the same way that Herschel is always credited with discovering Uranus and Clyde Tombaugh with Pluto. With Neptune, it is not so easy and the full story was the subject of our November Zoom presentation by Carolyn Kennett. The link between Uranus …
About stars
Snippets from a talk by Colin Stuart Colin dispelled one common myth about sunlight, which is that light takes about eight minutes to reach the Earth from the Sun. This is true but misleading. Light will indeed travel from the surface of the Sun to us in eight minutes. The energy was though released deep …
Lost Worlds of the Solar System
IntroductionOur November talk was “Lost Worlds of the Solar System” by Professor Hilary Downes of Birkbeck College and was a challenging combination of geology and astronomy. Her talk began with an overview of the early solar system before focussing on her work on the evidence from meteorites containing remnants of “lost worlds”. I will get …
Is the Earth special?
It is a widely-held view that we are not alone in the Universe. There are so many billions upon billions of stars, many of which could have accompanying planets, that surely, surely there must be some planets which enjoy the conditions needed for life and specifically intelligent life, to evolve. Indeed it seems increasingly common …
James Webb Space Telescope
Building and launching the JWS telescope Our May 2020 meeting was a first for us, our first on-line presentation given that our normal meetings could not happen because of the Covid-19 emergency. Member Charles Dixon was already scheduled in May to give a talk on the James Webb Space Telescope and he gamely agreed to …
Mission to Touch the Sun
At the time of Andrew Collins’ May 2019 talk to the Farnham Astronomical Society about the Parker Solar Probe, the probe had just completed the second of 24 close approaches to the Sun. By now (early July 2019), it will be well on its way to the furthest point on its very elliptical orbit, soon …
How our Moon formed
How our Moon formed – the least implausible theory It is a sobering thought that if it wasn’t for our Moon, Earth would be a very different place and we would certainly not be inhabiting it. The Moon acts to stabilise our tilt axis which has the effect of also stabilising our climate, over the …