The Observatory

If the weather permits there are observing sessions open to the public on a Friday evening.
Details of opening times and the site’s location can be found on the Observatory page.

The observatory also opens on the first Sunday morning of the month from 10am until 1pm in support of Abbey Leys Farmers’ Market – again, weather permitting.

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Recent Images – 24th April 2026 : Friday observing

We were joined by over a dozen visitors on Friday.  Having been thwarted by poor weather for much of the year thus far, we were very pleased to see such a good turnout.

There were 4 telescopes running: the RASA in the roll-off shed, the Celestron 9.25 in the dome and, in the compound, a manually operated Skywatcher and a robotic SeeStar S50.  The Celestron and Skywatcher were being used as visual instruments observing the Moon and Jupiter; the RASA and SeeStar were imaging deep sky objects – the Owl nebula and the Hercules globular cluster.  That being said, we had some great images of the Moon from various phones held up to the Skywatcher eyepiece… what a souvenir to be able to take home!

Meetings

HLCO holds meetings on the second Thursday of each month in St John’s church room (location details here). Talks in astronomy and space research are given by invited experts or members of the HLCO team themselves. A small charge is made for these events. See below for details of future meetings.

We are always on the lookout for speakers. If you have an astronomy-related topic you’d like to share with a group of like-minded individuals, please get in touch by emailing hlco.steering@gmail.com

Upcoming HLCO Meetings

• June 11th 2026

  Exoplanets – planets outside our Solar System

  

  To date, NASA has recorded over 6200 examples of exoplanets. Most of them orbit other stars, but some are free-floating exoplanets, called rogue planets, and are untethered to any star.

  Mark Holmes will give us an overview of this fascinating topic..

• July 9th 2026

  Our Upcoming Solar Eclipse

  There’s an eclipse coming up on August 12th and it will be visible from High Legh – weather permitting, of course.

  

  The path of totality will cross Greenland, Iceland, Spain and a small area of north eastern Portugal. Other parts of Europe – including the UK – will see a partial solar eclipse.  In High Legh we should observe 92% of the Sun’s disk covered by the Moon… unless the clouds and/or trees get in the way ☹

  Image from timeanddate.com

  In anticipation, this month’s talk will be a brief overview of eclipses followed by the detail of the August event.

• September 10th 2026

  The origin of life
  ‘It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of the origin of life …’ (Charles Darwin 1863)

  This quote comes from a letter written in 1863 by Charles Darwin to his friend Joseph Dalton Hooker, a British geographer and explorer. In the context of the letter, Darwin was expressing his scepticism towards the speculative theories on the origin of life which were prevalent at the time. Darwin expressed his view that there was no scientific evidence to explain the origins of life. In the 163 years since Darwin wrote his letter, has anything changed? Do Darwin’s words still hold true in 2026?

  

  Emeritus Professor Philip James will review Darwin’s 1863 statement in the light of current scientific knowledge, a time when our understanding is being shaped by advances in experimentation, observation and theory.

  In this talk Professor James will explore changing definitions of ‘life’ and the implications this has for understanding the origins of life and the search for life on other planets; discuss the genesis of rocky planets and the process that resulted in the Earth becoming habitable; examine how knowledge gained from the analysis of meteorites, samples from Bennu, and interstellar space is shaping our understanding of the precursors to life; and set out the current ideas on the origin of life on earth.