Author Archives: TerryG

December 14th 2023

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There will be two parts to our festive meeting.

First up will be Mark Holmes to present the second part of his talk entitled “Venus, from Antiquity, Myth to Hell”, which he started in our November session. Having preciously introduced us to Venus; running from antiquity to modern space probes and even the possibility of life in the Venusian atmosphere, he now moves on to describe how we might begin making observations of this fascinating planet.

That will be followed, after a special tea break, by Colin’s ever-popular Christmas quiz… and you don’t want to miss that!

November 9th 2023

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Mark Holmes will present his talk entitled “Venus, from Antiquity, Myth to Hell”, which he recently delivered to COSMOS (Community Observatory St Martins on Scilly).

Mark says “This will be a broad sweep of history and myth all the way through to modern probes and our understanding of our ‘Sister Planet’“.

August 10th 2023

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Our Chair Mark Holmes promises an intriguing talk with the title “Solar Maximum is coming – what are we doing at HLCO?”

Over the past months there has been a remarkable increase in the number and size of sunspots. Here is one of Mark’s images, taken on 7th July.

July 13th 2023

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Our talk will be given by Dr. Helen Jermak from the Astrophysics Research Institute at Liverpool John Moores University. Her topic is ‘Building the world’s largest ground-based robotic telescope’ and she has offered to bring some demonstration items with her!

For those with long memories; Helen was the first guest speaker we had at HLCO (way back in 2014) when she gave a talk on Blazars.

June 8th 2023

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Our Chairman Mark Holmes will give June’s talk.  His topic is “The furnace in which we were all forged – Stars, the creative engines of the Universe!”

A star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (image taken from Wikipedia)

Image taken by Mark on 27th May 2023 using 17mm eyepiece projection/Mylar through the mighty 60mm Nutellascope.

April 13th 2023

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Jamie Gilmore from the University of Manchester will give a talk on “Meteorites and the Early Solar System”

Jamie is Professor of Planetary Science at the University of Manchester.  His personal research involves studying the composition of xenon gas trapped in extra-terrestrial material to understand the formation and evolution of the solar system and the bodies within it.

This talk will include an introduction to meteorites and some of the things that have been learned about the solar system by studying them

February 9th 2023

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Dr. Steve Barret

Dr. Steve Barrett from the University of Liverpool gave two short presentations:
Just a Second – What is a second, what can happen in one second, and why do we need leap seconds?
Ancient Light – The Universe is vast and ancient. Large telescopes have imaged galaxies that are billions of light-years distant. Is it possible to capture an image of one of these very remote objects without a telescope?