Winter Deep Sky Camp was held at the campsite at Tuesnoad from Friday 29th February to Sunday 2nd March.

Summer Deep Sky Camp was held at the campsite at Tuesnoad from Friday 4th to Monday 7th April.

A Mystery London Astronomy Tour was held on Sunday 27th April.

This year the Society's Starbecue was held in Rick's garden on Saturday 5th July. It was again a D.I.Y. affair...

Summer Deep Sky Camp was held at the campsite at Tuesnoad from Friday 1st to Monday 4th September.

Carole Pope writes:

7 Members of OAS made their way down to the MSSL Centre in Surrey.  There were magnificent views of the valley below and when it got dark later in the evening it was a fantastically dark sky for Astronomy purposes.  Unfortunately the skies did not stay clear long enough for the Guildford Astronomical Society to be able to show very much through the telescopes they had brought with them, an LX90, and a Coronado etc.  

There was lots to see around the house, including exhibits of models such as the Giotto flight “spares” , Cassini’s Electron spectrometer flight spare, and what is left of the toxic Cluster instrument – complete with hydrazine encased in a glass cabinet, and scale models of Ampte UKS spacecraft.  In the hallway there was the British Skylard rocket up the stair well (in 3 sections).  Around the walls were posters of the missions MSSL have been involved in.  

The afternoon started off with a talk from Prof. Alan Smith, the Director of MSSL who told us about the history of MSSL and what they do.  MSSL was established in 1965.  Holmbury House, was bought and renovated and MSSL moved in and it was  formally opened in 1967.  He told us that they had been involved in 19 past missions, 12 current missions and 11 planned in the future such as Euclid, Plato, Gaia, IXO and Cross-Sale missions, where they make instruments which go on other people’s rockets.  The instruments must be durable to withstand the effects of space flight and last the length of the mission.  MSSL are interested, among other things, in Climate Extremes, Solar and Stellar Physics, Imaging, Cryogenics and the Electromagnetic spectrum as well as Space Weather.  

We then had a talk from Prof. Andrew Coates who talked about the absence of magnetic fields on Venus, Mars, Titan and comets comparing them to Earth with a magnetic field.  He has been involved in Venus Express, Mars Express and the Huygens missions, and future mission Exomans in 2016 by the MSSL who will build the panoramic optical lenses.  

There was a 3rd talk from Professor Louise Harra, who talked about space weather, solar maximum and solar minimum and briefly touched on the SOHO and STEREO missions.  One interesting fact she told us is that homing pigeons should not be flown when there is high geomagnetic activity as they can lose their sense of direction, and also that many whales can be stranded at such times as the GPS signals are blocked.  

There were other activities going on with Joanna Griffin an artist who talked about satellite stories which continued into the grounds and ended up at the lake where later Chinese lanterns were floated on the water.  

There was also a children’s tent with various activities such as making solar system bracelets and water rockets etc.

The day was free and refreshments were provided including cakes and mulled wine.

A small party of Society members made their ways by various means to Mill Hill to have a tour of UCL's observatory on Saturday evening. The observatory tour had been postponed twice before, but that meant we got to see it in its newly refurbished glory. We were met by the former Director Mike Dworetsky and two UCL astronomy students. The sky was clear when we arrived but due to cloud over so we started the tour by having a brief look at a double star, Gamma Andromedae, through the Fry telescope. Then the clouds obscured the stars. We were then shown round the observatory.

The Fry telescope is a beautifully restored 1862 Cooke 8-inch refractor. It was presented to the Observatory in January 1930 by Mr. H. R. Fry of Barnet. It was refurbished from 1982 to 1997 by UCL students and staff, and looks really stunning.

We then had a look at a modern Celestron 14-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain scope on a Paramount mount which is being used for research astrometric observations such as those used in the search for exo-planets. Next was the the Radcliffe twin refractor. This was built in 1901 by Grubb of Dublin, originally for the Radcliffe observatory in Oxford, where it was used primarily for parallax work, and was moved to Mill Hill in 1938. This is the largest telescope on site with a massive dome. It has one 24 inch refractor and one 18 inch refractor piggybacked on a German equatorial mount. A computer-controlled guidance system was built for it in the early 90s, and is still used to control it.

Finally we were shown The Allen telescope. This is a 24-inch Cassegrain reflecting telescope of Ritchey-Chretien design, built for UCL in 1974. It is mainly used for spectrographic work.

The tour ended in the observatory's lecture room, with a showing of an extract on the birth of stars from an ESA DVD, and a chance to ask questions. This was an excellent tour enjoyed by all, many thanks to Mike and his students for a wonderful evening.

(Browse our gallery for larger versions of the photographs.)

About 20 people attended this first course on imaging at High Elms on Saturday. Fay started off with a very inspiring talk on her own journey to understand and overcome all the technical problems. Mike then gave a short overview of the equipment required to do imaging, followed by Mark on how to use a DSLR camera. This involved an explanation of the process of taking dark frames to cancel out the noise produced by the electronic circuitry in the camera. After a tea break John gave a demonstration of how to image the moon and planets using a webcam, with an explanation of the stacking process used on the computer to select only the in-focus frames. Robert then finished off the afternoon with a talk on the more advanced use of cooled CCD cameras and software.

Unfortunately we ran out of time here as the staff wanted to lockup! Another session is definitely called for. Many thanks to all the contributors for a very interesting afternoon, and to Mike for organising it all.