May 10th - Bromley Adult Learners' Day Print E-mail

Telescopes on the OAS stand Bromley Council, through their Adult Learners Programme invited the OAS to put on a display at Bromley Central Library on Saturday 10th May. Always keen to follow up on any form of promotion, the committee decided to take a table, ask for volunteers to man (or is that person) the stand and despite the very short notice, take up the challenge to put on a small exhibition of what is the Orpington Astronomical Society does.

Jeff Harries, Paul Whitmarsh and Greg were first on the scene, setting up the table with promotional material, 3D pictures, the all important membership forms and of course telescopes.

Greg and Delphine had had experience of this type of request from the local council before, so it was expected that the day would pass more or less without incident - no many people would stop or pause at the stand and move on. However things did not turn out that way at all. The table was positioned at the top of the main stairs coming into the library - a very good position indeed! Within only a short time after the doors had opened visitors to the library were pausing and stopping and best of all chatting to the various OAS volunteers that had joined the stand during the day. Tom Meecham and Sean Mulcahy were on hand to give advice and indeed rarely sat down before there was another inquiry.

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Viewing 3-D images
About midday, Joe Sheahan and Tony Buick (along with his son) were also seen giving advice. Indeed, Tony's past skills as a teacher came into play with the children - so hopefully he may have encouraged several parents to bring along some new younger possible members.

There was one noteworthy incident at the very beginning, shortly after the doors to the library had been opened to the public. A slightly scruffy man in his mid to late twenties came up to the table asking if we could answer a simple scientific question about "what size lens dose it require to see the mess that David Beckham fans had left in Bromley". It was an interesting question OAS members thought. Unfortunately, they were unable to provide an answer as the man began to rant. Within a very short time his attitude had become almost violent and his voice had gotten so loud that there was an echo off the far side of the cavernous Bromley library. He then left...

...now back to the question "what size lens does it require to see the mess that David Beckham fans had left in Bromley". If any members wish to pursue this as a valid point, then there is always the forum....

 
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Future Events

Apologies
Our apologies for the lock-out at our last Thursday meeting. We hope we'll be able to re-arrange a date for Alec Boksenberg to give us his talk about "What the Stuff Between Galaxies Tells Us" at a later date.
 
Special Events
From time to time we arrange outings and other special events like these:

Deep Sky Camps

These are held at various locations. Usually we use commercial camp sites, and each visitor will be expected to pay the camp site operator for their own pitch. We'll usually try to arrange for our pitches to be in a group, so you'll need to mention you're one of the astronomers when you book.

Occasionally the Society books a site for its exclusive use, and on these occasions we'll expect all attendees (anyone visiting the site) to contribute to the cost, even if they're not actually camping on site.

Outings

In recent years we have visited places like the Greenwich Observatory, The radio telescopes and historic instruments at Cambridge, and the Herschel museum in Bath.

Open Days

These have usually co-incided with relatively predictable astronomical phenomena like meteor showers, and have included observing, short lectures and demonstrations. The most recent one was in August 2003 for the National Astronomy Week.

Public Lectures & Exhibitions

A recent one of our our exhibitions was our 21st Anniversary Celebration entitled Universe Day, held at St Olave's School in Orpington in 2001 - more than 300 people turned up to see all the latest in local astronomy.

Every two or three years we hold in memory of one of our founder members and chairmen, the Kenneth Budd Memorial Lecture. So far we have held three well attended meetings. The first Kenneth Budd Memorial Lecture, in November 1998 was given by Prof. Sir Antony Hewish, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work on pulsars. His lecture was titled "Thirty Years of Pulsar Astronomy", and the second, in October 2000, when Ewen A. Whitaker FRAS gave a lecture titled "Fifty Years with Lunar Maps".

Please always try check the forum for details of the arrangements before the event.