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

The UK experienced a fabulous aurora display last night. Here is some video of the images captured by the Observatory All Sky Camera. You can also see this video on YouTube.

May’s talk will be “SMILE! Revolutionising our views of the Sun-Earth connection”, delivered by Dr Jennifer Carter,