Arthur Davis’ Sky Notes and Sky Chart for May 2017
April meeting
There was a great turnout for our April meeting!
Unfortunately Bob Mizon was unable to give his talk, so many thanks to Paul Bennett, Ambassador for the Lunar One Mission (LM1) for taking his place.
The object of LM1 is to land a craft on the South Pole of the moon to do science in support of future human habitation. A major spinoff from the project is in education particularly in the STEM subjects. The mission also intends to remove a core sample from the landing site and to archive material contributed by ‘earthlings’ at the site. See https://lunarmissionone.com/ for further details on how get involved.
After the break, Arthur Davis presented Coma Berenices as his ‘Constellation of the month’ and identified interesting objects including M53, M64, M100 and the Coma cluster.
Bud Budzynski described the superb lunar images he showed as his ‘best ever’. If you’ve ever seen his previous shots you would understand how good these were. Awesome! Great work, Bud.
Martyn Pryce’s image of M81, M82 and NGC 3077 was excellent, and as a refreshing change, he shared with us a great shot of a double rainbow taken in Merriott. If this is an example, we should pay more attention to the atmospheric phenomena of our own planet! It would be nice to see some more of this type of shot.
Very many thanks to all who helped at the meeting and especially to the ‘kitchen crew’ who had extra work to do because of a larger than usual attendance.
Thanks too to Zena and Mike for getting our speaker to and from the meeting.
Next month Dan Oakley’s talk will be ‘Dark Skies’. South Downs National Park and beyond. Hope to see you there.
Programme change alert!
13 April, 2017
Just to let you know that Bob Mizon won’t be able to do his talk as scheduled. In his place will be Paul Bennett, Ambassador for the Lunar Mission One project. Further details of this project can be found at: LunarMissionOne.com.
See you next Wednesday!
Arthur Davis’ April Sky notes and chart
19 March, 2017
Adrian Zielonka’s space news and charts
28 February, 2017
Ash Primary School 8 Feb ’17
9 February, 2017
Great evening with over 100 children and parents at Ash Primary School last night. We had 4 scopes on the go so the queues were not too long. Bud, Ken, Jan, Chris and Ron had a good time too.
Despite a lot of cloud, we had great views of Venus, Mars, and the moon and were treated to a bright overhead pass of the ISS which caused much excitement.
Thanks to the Chair of the PTA Jenny Bridge for inviting us and for the welcome drinks and snacks.