Author: BASEG

Practical Astronomy Show 2024

Most of the BASEG membership attended the Practical Astronomy Show held at the Stoneleigh Park show grounds on 23rd March 2024, luckily admission and parking was free.

My first impressions of the show was that it was smaller than I expected and this was because a couple of the industries well known vendors such as First Light Optics and Rother Valley Optics were unfortunately not present and I think the experience was lacking due to their absence 🙁 Of the vendors present there was good selection of items that we normally see at the other shows held during the year in the UK.

One of the group take interest in the Starlight Express stand where a prototype of their new active optics guiding (AOG) unit was on the table. The team told us that the unit was still currently in the design stage but hopefully would be available in the near future.

At the large Altair Astro stand which was always busy, the Pegasus Falcon Rotator 2 and Focus Cube 3 Universal focuser appealed to me in particular being a Pegasus fan. After some soul searching I decided to purchase them although I’m not yet sure which scope to attach them to !

One of the group bought an ZWO AM3 mount to replace their traditional mount which clearly was purchased for the BASEG Mount Teide (Tenerife) trip this coming July. Another decided to purchase the ZWO Seestar S50 which I’m sure will very likely to also make an appearance at Mount Teide !

Quite a few of us spent time at the stand hosted by the Webb Deep Sky Society. Here the amount of available publications was outstanding and as usual Owen Brazell was ever present. If you are into visual observing then it is highly recommended to join the society.

Webb Deep Sky Society Stand

The following week after the show there was the announcement by Pegasus of the NYX-88 harmonic mount which is billed as the smaller brother to the existing NYX-101 mount. This was a real shame that a unit it was not available to be shown by one of the dealers.

I did get to walk around most of the vendors and chat before we left but I forgot to pop over the brilliant W&W Astro to look for a spare dew strap, so I will need to do that online at some point …. sorry Barbara 🙂

An informative Youtube video of the show was published by Astrobloke where he chatted to the various vendors in some depth.

Astrobloke PAS 2024 walk around

A common comment amongst the group was the lack of adequate seating, especially given the amount of empty floor space in the venue as well as the long queue for refreshments. A shout-out should go to the vendors and organisers who took the time to travel to the venue as it make take some effort but especially to the site/security staff at the show who were polite and very helpful – thank you !

BAA Comet Section Meeting (8/7/2023)

A group of us recently attended the British Astronomical Association (BAA) Comet Section Meeting. This was held at the fantastic Greenwich Maritime Museum and organised by the Flamsteed Astronomical Society (FAS).

StartEndSpeakerSubject
09:00Doors Open
09:3009:45Nick James (FAS)Welcome From BAA & FAS
09:4510:15Walk to Greenwich Planetarium
10:1511:00Planetarium (Meteors & Comets)
11:0011:30Walk from Planetarium
11:3011:45Nick JamesComet News
11:4512:15Dr. Richard MilesUpdate on Mission 29P
12:1512:45Helen UsherComet chasers & pro-am
12:4513:45Lunch Break
13:4514:15Jonathan ShanklinComet Analysis
14:1514:45Thomas LehmannComet magnitude estimation using AIRTOOLS
14:4515:15Robin LeadbeaterDissecting Comets using Spectroscopy
15:1516:00Break
16:0016:30Dr John MasonComets & Meteoroid streams
16:3017:30Prof. Alan FitzsimmonsExocomets
17:3018:00Closing discussion
The Published Agenda

Following the introductions the group walked up the Greenwich Observatory Planetarium for a presentation. Unfortunately even though the resident astronomer did an interesting talk, the comfy chairs, lack of sleep and early start meant quite a few eyes started to close !

All the talks were informative ranging from Helen’s talk on her outreach efforts working with schools and enabling the students to submit their comet observations and as a result being cited on publications. The talks on Comet analysis, estimating magnitudes to the techniques and equipment used to perform spectroscopy on the coma, ion tail and dust tail.

The final section of talks was covered the charismatic Dr John Mason talking about predicting the future meteor storm intensity based on the earth passing through different dust clouds of past comet passes.

Professor Alan Fitzsimmons talked about the recent efforts and discoveries made on exocomets using new observatories like TESS and JWST.

Our gratitude goes to the BAA, Flamsteed Astronomical Society and the fantastic Greenwich Museum staff for providing us with a great day.

BASEG Members

Hopefully at some point in the near future the talks will be found at the BAA’s Youtube channel.

Tenerife 2023 Expedition Booked

So BASEG have recently booked our flights and hotel accomodation for our Tenerife 2023 Expedition. We now have a grand total of 11 participants and as long as the world does not have a repeat of global ‘Human Malware’ epidemic or a deranged lunatic doesn’t try to blow the world up then we will going to Mount Teide for Astronomy/Astrophotography.

Quite of few of the group have been purchasing Harmonic Mounts (ZWO/Pegasus) in an attempt to reduce their travelling weight. It will be interesting to see what scopes are used on the mobile mounts …. interesting times.

Member attends ORION open evening, Oak Ridge (USA)

One of our members recently attended an open evening lecture on 19th September 2018 hosted by ORION (Oak Ridge Isochronous Observation Network) at the Roane State Community College in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The meeting was attended by a broad range of ages including a group of high school students studying Astronomy.

The guest speaker was Mark Uhran who is currently employed at the local Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the ITER fusion reactor initiative.  Previously Mark has spent 28 years working with NASA on design, development and operation of the ISS. He retired from NASA headquarters in 2012 at the conclusion of the station assembly phase having completed his last 7 years as ISS Division Director.

His hour long lecture entitled “Human Space Exploration: The Merits of Avoiding Gravity Wells!” discussed the current US plan of placing future habitable orbital platforms at known Lagrange points before 2030.

The main reason to using the Lagrange points is that maintaining position and moving between these points takes little to no fuel at all especially when using ION drives.

The Lunar Lagrange platform would be habitable allowing it to function as a jump point to targets further afield such as a mission Mars. Another advantage of the Lunar Lagrange point is being able to observe the activities of other nations on the dark side of the Moon.

He also went on to discuss the use of private companies and emerging technologies that will to be needed to be employed in order to fulfil the project goals in a timely and cost effective manner.

One interesting point was the recent change of US policy to allow the use of Nuclear Fission reactors (U235) rather than radiothermal generators (RTG) that utilise Pu238 such as those used for the Cassini mission. The rationale behind such a decision is due to the energy output boost of fission reactors. This would allow the the outward journey time to Mars to be reduced from 300-150 days (depends on planetary positions) to 30 days. This would vastly reduce the effect of the potentially life threatening radiation on the human crew.

There is an open conference in Oak Ridge October 23-25th entitled “The TVIW Power Of Synergy Space Symposium” to promote safe, fast, and affordable human development of the solar system.

ORION also have regular public observation meeting at Tamke-Allan Observatory in Rockwood, Tennessee on the first and third Saturday of the month.  The facility has an indoor classroom with available toilet facilities.

Tenerife9 2018 Session Ends Early – Saharan Dust Stops Play

The group has had to bring the session to an early close due to the Saharan dust levels wiping out the sky quality. Known as the Calima, hot winds from the East bring Saharan dust across to Tenerife which destroys the sky quality needed for deep sky imaging.

We monitored the SONG (Stellar Observations Network Group) weather page throughout the week to assess our chances at clear sky imaging. When the red level is breached then the resident telescopes at Teide close their domes. For our purposes we were looking for dust levels around 0.001 which is below the yellow line.

Reproduced with kind permission of the SONG Telescope (data values by STELLA)

Before the Calima arrived the SQM was measured to be around 21.68 mag/arc sec2 (Bortle class 4) compared to around 20.5 (Bortle class 4/5) in the UK local area. Bob’s image also shows the visible layer of Calima dust :

Calima dust layer blocks the view to Mount Teide

It was a good week for all regardless of the common issues many of us encountered that stopped initial imaging attempts but once into the groove some nice images started to appear both for the portable deep sky imagers and those using the Mons Telescope for spectroscopy and lunar/planetary imaging (Mars/Jupiter/Saturn/Neptune/Uranus).

The founding BASEG members

We would like to extend our gratitude to the IAC for allowing us to the use of the Mons Telescope and the associated facilities ….. gracias amigos 🙂