Ayton Meeting – End of Season Spectacular
A selection of presentations by S&RAS Members, for Members, on a range of Astronomy topics
Cakes will be in attendance, as well as an Astro Quiz
Friday 15th September 7.45pm, East Ayton Village Hall
Guest Speaker: Jurgen Schmoll – Balloon Borne Astronomy.
The talk Jurgen was due to give us back in February which had to be postponed.
Friday 29th September 7.45pm, East Ayton Village Hall
Introduction to Astronomy event
Friday 20 October 7.45pm, East Ayton Village Hall
Yjan Gordon of Hull University explains how we observe galaxies in the 21st century, what we can see, and why it matters.
Friday 17 November 7.45pm, East Ayton Village Hall
In his talk “ROSETTA – Landing On a Comet. Europe’s Apollo” guest speaker Stuart Atkinson, from Kendal in Cumbria, will look back at the European Space Agency’s hugely successful Rosetta mission to explore the comet 67P, which culminated in the first ever landing of a space probe on the surface of a comet.
Using a combination of official ESA images and exclusive images he has produced himself, by processing the raw data sent back by the Rosetta spacecraft, Stuart will take the audience on a fascinating tour of the enigmatic, ancient object the mission explored. The comet’s towering, crumbling ice cliffs, its huge jets of dust and gas and its rubble-strewn snowy plains will all be seen in exquisite detail.
And after the talk there’ll be a chance for members of the audience to actually “sniff a comet”… !
19 January 2018 7.45pm, East Ayton Village Hall
Have we been visited before? Are they out there watching… listening… studying us? And if they are out there, where might ‘there’ be? Our Milky Way Galaxy can be a nasty and inhospitable place for life to develop… but, all is not lost… there are some very unique and special places hidden amongst this hostile environment where the building blocks for life might just be right for extraterrestrial life to flourish. In this lecture, Professor Brad Gibson will examine the evidence for and against the existence of extraterrestrial life, and walk you through the associated good, bad, and ugly corners of our Galaxy.
Professor Brad Gibson is the Director of the E.A. Milne Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Hull. Brad completed his MSc and PhD at the University of British Columbia, building the world’s first Liquid Mirror Telescope Observatory and designing software to map the distribution of the chemical elements throughout the Universe. Brad was responsible for using exploding stars to determine the expansion rate of the Universe, as part of the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale, for which the team was awarded the 2009 Gruber Prize in Cosmology. With his PhD students, Brad also discovered the first evidence that our own Milky Way’s nearest neighbours were being cannibalised by our Galaxy, being ripped apart by intense tidal forces. Brad’s work has been acknowledged by his peers 20,000 times, making him Hull’s most cited academic, and one of the top few percent in the world. His 300 papers to date also include the identification of the locations within the Milky Way most likely to harbour complex biological life, for which his work was named by National Geographic magazine as one of the top 10 news stories of the year. His recent work has been in trying to link his expertise in galactic chemical evolution, with complex cosmological hydrodynamical schemes, in order to model the time evolution of the chemical and dynamical properties of the Milky Way.
16 February 2018 7.45pm, East Ayton Village Hall
A talk by Dr Gareth Few, University of Hull.
Full details nearer the time
21 April 2018 7.45pm, East Ayton Village Hall
John Nichol – Title TBC.
The society is delighted to bring back regular speaker Paul Money, from the BBC Sky at Night magazine, for what will be another excellent talk with Part 2 of his Triumphs of Voyager presentation.
15 June 2018 7.45pm, East Ayton Village Hall
End of Season Spectacular
A selection of presentations by S&RAS Members, for Members, on a range of Astronomy topics
Cakes will be in attendance, as well as an Astro Quiz