Category: BAA

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.

Visit to BAA Summer Meeting

Well a few of our members decided to have a day out, to fill the gap in our annual calendar from having a yearly visit to Astrofest, to our trip later this week to the MONS observatory on mount Teide in Tenerife.

So we travelled up to the BAA Sumer Meeting which had a host of great speakers from the professional field. Professors and Dr’s alike came to update us on their field of research based around planetary systems, both here and in the wider cosmos.

A couple of the talks that resonated really well were from Professor Giovanna Tinetti on Exoplanets and the best of the day had to go to Leigh Fletcher specking about the weather on giant gas planets.