Recent Club Activities

Halfpennt Green event

By Richard Harvey

Alongside our internet lectures and Zoom meetings, the society has arranged several observations sessions and outreach events in the past few months. Here’s a quick overview of what’s been going on ‘off-line’ recently.

On 12th August we met once again at Halfpenny Green Vineyard for a meteor watch, on the evening of the peak of the Perseids. This was a most successful event, with quite a crowd turning up. We were blessed with clear skies for once, and over sixty Perseid meteors were seen over three hours. Some were bright fireballs with smoke trails, and one showed a bright green hue. This was a real fun event, as many people got excited as they spotted Perseids streaking across the sky, it was like a cosmic piece of theatre! Using the BAA meteor observing forms I tried to keep track of them all, and some of us also managed to do some deep-sky and planetary observing as well. Quite a few members tried to capture an image, and Doug’s photo shows a Perseid in Aquarius, above Jupiter (there’s an un-cropped version of Doug’s photo on the society’s Flickr page).

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A Promising Start To The Year? Some 2017 Observations

By Richard Harvey

After a very cloudy 2016 winter, we’ve at last been afforded a handful of clear skies for the first few months of 2017. For some reason, Wednesdays seem to be the night we’ve had the most clear skies, with the weekends typically clouded over. This is most irritating for those for astronomers with 9-5 weekday jobs, it seems we’re always at the whims of nature!

Venus through 8” Skywatcher in January and February 2017
Photo 1 – Venus through 8” Skywatcher in January and February 2017

Venus has been putting on a superb show in the early evening sky, rising very high through February, and presently, (I’m writing this on 17th March), is heading lower in the Western sky. When it’s so visible, most amateur astronomers often get friends asking “what was that bright star I saw last night?” I’ve been asked several times over the past couple of months.

I took some photos of Venus through my 8” Skywatcher in January and February, and was pleased to be able to capture the both the changes in the apparent size and phases of the planet, as it gets nearer to us on its journey round the sun, (photo 1). On the 5th January it was approx 111,000,000 km away from the Earth, and on 26th February approx 54,000,000km away. It always fascinates me that Mercury and the Venus are the only planets that show Moon-like ‘phases’, being closer to the Sun than us.

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