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,

This month our speaker is Professor Anne Green who will be discussing “The search for dark matter”.

The first fireball from the observatory for 2024 was captured by it’s UK Meteor Network camera kit UK00AN in the early hours 04:07 UTC on the 21st March.

A recent spectacular sporadic meteor captured by the observatory meteor camera UK00AN on 13th February 2024 at 02:29 UTC, (credit UK Meteor Network).

Our speaker for March, Professor Nial Tanvir will be anwering “What re-ionised the Universe?”

Our next meeting will be on 01/02/2024. Professor Frazer Pearce will be Placing the Timelords on the Kardashev scale.

Due to school holidays our January meeting takes place on the second Thursday in January (Thursday 11th January 2024)

The speaker is Prof Phil Sutton from the University of Lincoln. The talk is titled Interstellar Interlopers. Visitors are most welcome to attend the meeting. Entry is £3 Adults, £1 Students.