Blog Archives

Over the last few months we have had a number of issues raised with our e-mail list. The mailing list we have been using goes back for a lot of years, and due to the feedback received, the committee has decided to delete all addresses on the mailing list and start again. In the interim,

Sungazing has been more miss than hit this season. Unusually the annual Perseid meteor shower did not disappoint. The weather was most co-operative (for a change!). Plenty of smaller meteors and a few real sky-splitters over the course of the evening. We had many visitors and quite a few folks imaging – take a look

A successful stargazing evening at the Sportsman Inn on Redmires Road before it clouded over at around 21:30. Some visual observations and a bit of imaging going on. Observed the Orion Nebula, the Double Cluster and the Andromeda Galaxy before the moon rose and bleached out all the faint fuzzies. Saturday 14th January 2017.

Normally, a stargazing event wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy, however as the weather has forsaken us time-and-time again, it’s good to be able to report that a successful stargazing event occurred on the evening of Saturday 17th December 2016. The clear weather forecast from the morning had turned into something of a coin-toss with the various

Over the past year-or-so, two society members have submitted “HowTo” articles to the BBC Sky at Night Magazine which were accepted for publication. Vince Sellars’ article, “How to make a pinhole camera for solargraphy” was published in the latest December 2016 issue and details how to create extremely long exposure trails of the Sun over

The first of our “Steve Adams” lectures was a great success, thanks to the incredible enthusiasm of our speaker, Professor Vik Dhillon, and the large turn-out of members and visitors. Vik’s talk concentrated heavily on on the sheer complexity and engineering that is required to construct the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), as well many

Despite the inconsistent weather forecast, we had a good day observing the Sun in Sheffield Botanical Gardens.

At the Transit of Mercury event, Stephen Jackson brought along his telescope and the Raspberry Pi camera. This is no normal astronomical imaging device. The setup of this camera allows anybody armed with an i-device (eg. iPhone, android phone, tablet PC, etc) to view the live image from the telescope directly on their device. The

I met Mike Mills at 09:30 at our top-secret location where we store the Telescopes. Mike was extremely organised with his comprehensive check-sheet of required equipment and paraphernalia. We took about 30 minutes to load up, checking and double-checking everything. We were due to meet Mike Gover and Andy Noble at Hallam Square around 11am;

The 2016 Transit of Mercury occurs on Monday 9th May. We will be in The Amphitheatre at Sheffield Hallam University, Hallam Square with our solar telescopes. First contact is at 12:12, with the planet Mercury crossing the disc of the Sun reaching last contact at 19:42. As always, take care when observing the Sun. The