Posts Tagged ‘Peter Campbell-Burns’

Measuring Distances – the “Distance Ladder” by Peter Campbell-Burns

A question we are often asked when we display the wonderful images taken by our members is ‘how far is away is that galaxy”. The answer is invariably a huge number in the order of hundreds of millions of light years away. Have you ever wondered how astronomers determine these distances?  In fact,...
July 6th, 2010 | Featured Articles, Resources | Read More

Spotting Iridium Flares by Peter Campbell-Burns

Anyone who spends even the smallest amount of time outside watching the night sky will have seen a satellite pass by – a dim pinpoint of light discernable from the background stars only by its movement across the sky – sometimes slow moving, sometimes moving very quickly. They can be a nuisance –...
July 5th, 2010 | Featured Articles, Resources | Read More

An Aldershot Connection With Astronomer Kenneth E Edgeworth

Try a search on Google for “the Aldershot Observatory” and you will find that a surprising number of hits are returned. Most of these are cloned articles but in one I made an interesting discovery that prompted me to dig a little deeper.  What follows is just a summary, but at the end of this...
June 24th, 2010 | Featured Articles | Read More

Henry Tiarks and the Museo Astronomico

Whilst taking a short vacation in Marbella my wife and I enjoyed an early evening stroll through the Parque de la Constitucion, a small oasis of green in the midst of a high-rise landscape that is so typical of the Spanish Costas. In the centre of this beautifully tended park we were quite surprised...
May 29th, 2010 | Featured Articles, Peter Campbell-Burns | Read More

After Your First Telescope by Peter Campbell-Burns

There are plenty of good words of advice to be found on the Internet on the subject of choosing a first telescope.    If you are a complete novice you could do no better than to read the advice posted on the Flamsteed Astronomy Society web site.   However, little is written about the next step.    I’ve...
May 12th, 2010 | Featured Articles, Resources | Read More

Waxing Gibbous Moon by Peter Campbell-Burns

 The following image of the Waxing Gibbous Moon was taken on Sunday 25th April using a small Williams Optics SD66 and Philips ToUcam.  The telescope was mounted on a photographic tripod (i.e. unguided) allowing only short AVI video sequences to be captured.     Although the SD66 has a short focal...
April 26th, 2010 | Featured Articles, Peter Campbell-Burns | Read More

The Leo Triplet and NGC 3628 by Peter Campbell-Burns and Kevin Pretorius

Peter: Kevin and I met at my house for a night of imaging. Despite the cloud of volcano ash over the UK we enjoyed a lovely sky.  The promised glorious sunsets had not appeared suggesting that the cloud was having minimal effect, but my images showed a brighter than usual background which may have...
April 19th, 2010 | Featured Articles, Kevin Pretorius, Peter Campbell-Burns | Read More

Astrometry Tools and the Aladin Sky Atlas by Peter Campbell-Burns

I have recently completed an Advanced University Certificate in ‘Astrophysics of Galaxies’, a challenging two-year distance learning course run by the University of Central Lancaster.  One of the course assignments required students to research the characteristics of a given peculiar galaxy using...
January 3rd, 2010 | Featured Articles | Read More

The Magnitude Scale by Peter Campbell-Burns

Even with the unaided eye we can make some estimates of the properties of a star against the dark background of the night sky. Perhaps the most obvious observation we can make is that some stars look brighter than others. Look very carefully and you will notice that some stars also reveal a hint of colour. A...
December 14th, 2009 | Resources | Read More

Andromeda Galaxy Imaged by Peter Campbell-Burns

the Andromeda Galaxy (M31, also designated NGC 224) is the only extra-galactic object that is visible to the naked eye.  The Persian scholar Abdal-Rahman Al Sufi was the first to make note of a “small cloud” in the constellation of Andromeda; it was rediscovered over 600 years later in 1612...
September 26th, 2009 | Peter Campbell-Burns | Read More