Inside This Issue

• Recollections of a Journal
  Editor
• NAS Exhibition
• Reprint of the December 1946 Bulletin, Issue 5 (The oldest known copy of our monthly Journal)

Tomorrow evenings meeting (Thursday 5th February) will now take place at BURNSIDE MEMORIAL HALL, PLUMTREE NG12 5ND and not the usual venue.

Venue: BURNSIDE HALL, PLUMTREE

Date: Thursday 5th February

Lecture starts at: 7:45pm 

The observatory all sky camera caught this view of a Falcon 9 over Nottingham skies –

The meteor cameras caught this footage –

Tonight’s theme is Orion

Live stream of the Moon, Mars and Jupiter from the NAS Observatory

1–9 February 2025

Nine days of astronomy across the UK

Welcome to the ninth National Astronomy Week. All week long we’ll be chasing the Moon across the sky as it passes a treasure trove of planets and winter constellations. Nottingham Astronomical Society will be live streaming on Wednesday 5th and Saturday 8th February on the National Astronomy Week YouTube channel Youtube.com/nationalastronomy week

We were treated to another display of celestial fireworks on the 10th October. Here is a timelapse from our all sky camera.

Dr Amaury Triaud from the University of Birmingham will be giving us a talk on Exoplanets, the Quest for Universal Life.
Amaury is one of the leading Exoplanet hunters, he will talk about some of the challenges of searching for Exoplanets.

We welcome back a very popular speaker, Paul Money, who will be talking about Trials and Tribulations of Voyager spacecraft.

The challenge with this recent lunar occultation of Saturn was the Moon was just a few hours past Full Moon and 97.4% illuminated at the start of the occultation. Although Saturn is relatively bright through the telescope, it is nothing in comparison to a Full Moon.

Full Moon at the start of the occultation was magnitude – 12.45 whereas Saturn was magnitude 0.65. Numerically this means the Moon was 173,780 times brighter than Saturn. Such differences in brightness are less of an issue for the human eye, but in astrophotography this poses a real issue.

First contact with the lunar limb at 04:29 (BST), the rings begin to appear at 05:17 (BST) from an unilluminated limb of the Moon just above the Mare Crisium.

Video footage of Saturn vanishing behind the Moon can be seen on the Society’s YouTube channel