Meeting report

A really excellent Members Night with a wide-ranging selection of short talks from ASE members. Lazy and cheap astronomy, Neutrinos and galaxy rotation, Smartscopes, Great Melbourne Telescope, Ralph Copeland and the Sky in September.

To start the meeting our Vice President Peter Black updated us on the upcoming Society programme. Peter also pointed out that our membership now stands at a very healthy 182. [...]

Prof. Andy Lawrence gave us a really interesting talk on 200 years of the history of astronomical imaging at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. Jim Nisbet also covered the Sky in June and this was followed by an SGM and our AGM.

Indigenous Australian Astronomy - Dr Pete Kuzma. This evening we had a fascinating and thought provoking talk from Dr Pete Kuzma of Edinburgh University. We were first introduced to the complexity and likely means of arrival, 45 - 65,000 years ago, in what would become modern Australia of the many nations of indigenous people from the Torres Strait to Tasmania.

We had a really enjoyable members night on Friday with a number of short presentations from members. The personal stories and journeys were really fascinating and well-told.

We had a very interesting talk from Dr Roberta Zanin from Bologna in Italy about The Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory: a new eye on the most extreme Universe. Jim Nisbet reviews the talk for us.

We had an excellent talk from Dr Thomas Wilson of the University of St Andrews.  He covered the life-cycle of a planetary system: how they are born, live and die [...]

Tosh White tells us about the talk from Prof. Emily Levesque, zooming in from Seattle, and running through some ideas and themes from her book “The Last Stargazers”. “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

Radim Stano reports on one of our special Imaging & Observing Group meetings with guests. We had 2 special guests, both from the British Astronomical Association Radio Astronomy Section and both trustees of the UK Radio Astronomy Association, Paul Hearn and Andrew Thomas.