Val has been out and about again! (lucky old her!)

If ever you visit the beautiful city of Prague, the Stefanik Observatory is well worth

seeing. It stands high up on Petrin Hill in a beautiful environment, fairly close to the

city centre and is easily reached by funicular railway. Two domes are accessible to the public: The main dome houses a historical double refractor made by Zeiss about a hundred

years ago. The western dome houses a modern reflecting telescope with a diameter of 37cm. The observatory is open for day time and night time viewings. During the day you

can observe the sun using a dark filter. When I visited last April I was fortunate to have a clear night sky and saw lovely

views of Saturn. There are also some excellent exhibitions showing a "Guide to Astronomy" and its

history. Currently showing is a model of the inside of the Vostik spacecraft used by

Yuri Gargarin on the first journey into outer space.

Thanks Val for an interesting report…sounds like you had an interesting time!

Forthcoming events:

Month 2011

Date - Friday night

Subject Speaker Host Society

January 14th TBA Christopher Tout

John Couch Adams Astronomer -Cambridge Uni

February 11th Jupiter-family Comets

Ryan Laird FRAS

Uni of Kent & Canterbury

March 11th

Astronomical Polarimetry - does it provide clues to the origin of life on Earth?

Prof James Hough

Uni of Hertford

April 8th Northern Lights Experience

Nigel Bradbury

-

May 13th TBA - -

June 10th TBA - -

July 8th X-ray Views of the Solar System

Graziela Branduardi Raymont

Mullard Space Science Lab

August September

no ordinary meeting Sat 10th

see Users' Group Meeting StarBQ bring-a-picnic

at Headley Heath

- Friends of Headley

September 3rd 9th

StarBQ TBA

- -

October 14th TBA - -

November 11th TBA - -

December 9th AGM+talks TBA

KELLING HEATH SEPTEMBER 2011 After the fiasco of the March event, where high winds had people sitting in their tents just to keep them on the ground in gusts of up to 30m.p.h, the autumn star party was a much more comfortable affair. The management at Kelling were extremely understanding when I did not arrive at the March event, to the point where they transferred my pitch fees over to the September event at no loss of funds to me…in my book that’s well above and beyond the call of duty! As we have come to expect of this event at Kelling Heath, booking in on arrival was smooth and trouble free, with friendly smiles and helpful advice on the layout of the camp site for people on their first visit , and ‘nice to see you back’ for the old lags! By the way, this is the best time to book for next year to be sure of getting a pitch, and me being me, and my wallet afraid, I booked for both dates next year! Pitching the tent is now down to a fine art…33minutes with no fist fights wiv ‘er indoors, leaving the more enjoyable task of setting up the Meade. I was pleased to note that all the important bits had in fact been packed this year, thanks to check lists at van loading time, (apart from the cooking stove, and that might have been by design, but don’t tell her!!) Putting the ‘scope together was a pleasure; for me it is a very satisfying process, re-aquainting myself with each component, caressing and fettling as I go. It’s a hybrid these days, consisting of a 10” Meade LX90 (de-forked) cat at f10 (good optics), and a Celestron CGEM mount as an entry level imaging mount. …you can basically read that as ‘all I could afford!’, in fact the only thing I did not sell to get it was the long suffering ‘er indoors’! As soon as dark started to fall I connected things up to the battery and off we went. I have to say that I find the hand paddle much more easy to use than the Meade one, and very quickly I had every thing aligned ready for the evenings viewing. I must say though the only slight difficulty was that I could not see the cross hairs very well in the finder, so at times a little guess work was involved in the alignment process. I am currently investigating illuminated cross hairs. I will keep you posted. As so often happens in our hobby, no sooner had I got things aligned….the clouds rolled in! It was around that time that I hit the demon drink! And with cloud cover still prevailing, I collapsed into a stupor, only to be roused by a swift kick from E.I.D at around 2:30 am. Feeling like death, I checked the ‘scope and went to work on Orion, spending a lot of time on M42 and many other objects. The next night was good, giving me my first view of the ‘Veil’ in Cygnus, plus a whole raft of other objects. One of the major attractions of an event like this is there are many people around you all with a common interest, so conversation is never in short supply! The next three tents down from me were inhabited by members of the West of London Astronomical Society ( www.wolas.org.uk ). Speaking to them they were saying how they had just spent over £1000 on having their website re-designed, so, like any good heathen, I cross examined them like Rumpole of the Bailey, and promptly nicked their best ideas for use with our new website!

Vendors!, the star party is well supported by the likes of the ‘Widescreen centre’ Where Simon was on great form, with unbiased advice, and all sorts kit to spank your credit card with, including a full array of Teleview ‘Ethos’eyepieces , and in general, more ‘scope bling than you could shake a stick at! There are also plenty of people selling unwanted equipment at very good prices, and I could not resist a ‘scope coat’, almost new, for the princely sum of £12! I had a good chat with Mr Bob Mizon MBE, and was able to thank him personally for the work he has done on the campaign for dark skies, and related some of my observations with a Meade etx 90 from light polluted Heathrow! Finally, another big plus with the Kelling Heath star party is that there are many attractions around the area, Sheringham is a little coastal town a few miles down the road with a nice beach and loads of pubs, also Cromer is only a short drive away , and the famous ‘Cromer Crabs’ are just delicious!

LET’S BUILD AN OBSERVATORY! For most of us, sooner or later, we find that carrying that heavy telescope outside each observing session, setting it up and then taking it down becomes a chore. Possibly to the point where we stop using it. In this series of short articles I will discuss my ideas on providing a permanent home for my Meade 10” LX90 (de-forked) and Celestron CGEM mount. The beginning: ‘Let’s sell up and move to the country!’ A phrase that has been heard in our house for a good five years now. I come from the ‘country’, so for me it will be going ‘home’ after twenty years living in the Smoke! It also means that I can build a permanent observatory for my telescope and get on with the learning of good astrophotography. So, let’s set out the things that I want to achieve with this structure:

1. House the telescope and ancillary equipment that goes with it. 2. Provide some protection from wind while observing. 3. Build a solid pier for the mount. 4. Contain a warm room 5. Contain other areas to carry out my other hobby…brewing (and drinking)

beer! 6. It must look reasonably presentable to ‘er indoors’ For me the other important factor is it must be large enough where the telescope resides to ‘swing several cats’! It goes without saying that power; light and water need to be laid in also. I have named my yet to be built observatory ‘TEN FORWARD’ after the bar aboard the ‘U.S.S. Enterprise D’ as they both serve as a place to drink and look at the stars ! The next thing I have to decide is how big do I go with the design, and how much space will be available to me. It may appear that I have these two questions in reverse order but I ‘aint!...if the house don’t have a big garden, we ‘aint buyin’ it! So to determine how much space I need at the telescope end I have set up my equipment on a few separate occasions and measured an area around it by placing cardboard boxes on the ground, and seeing if I fall over them!...might sound a bit Heath Robinson but it works for me. With boxes at six feet by six feet I did just that,..I fell over them unless I was very careful. At eight feet by eight feet things worked with room to spare, so lets add on a couple of more feet and say an area of ten feet by ten feet should do it! I will discuss other space parameters next time!

Alan Lane reports: EAS Meeting July 8th 2011 Members heard Tony Sizer talk about planetary transits of the Sun. Tony began by saying that besides being an interesting event transits were an important part of astronomical discovery and measurement. Of the 1500 or so extra solar planets (including those as yet unconfirmed) so far discovered many had been found while in transit of their parent star. In the history of Solar System astronomy much had depended on the transits across the face of the Sun and of Venus in particular. The only other planet, of course, to cross the Sun as seen from Earth, is Mercury. By the early 17th century Johannes Kepler had worked out the shape of the orbits of the five known planets and the Earth and their relative distances from each other, all he lacked was the absolute size of the system. A single accurate measurement would provide all the information required. Such a measurement could be obtained using a transit of Venus. Unfortunately transits of Venus are few and far between. Because the plane of the orbit of Venus is inclined 3.4 degrees to that of the Earth the planet often passes above or below the Sun as seen from here. In the present era transits of Venus occur in pairs separated by eight years followed by a gap of over a century or although this will alter in the future. The last pair was 1874 -1882 and the most recent transit was in 2004. Another will follow in 2012. It is possible to live a whole life and never see a transit of Venus (my parents could not have seen one even had they had possessed a telescope. AL). Kepler himself died before the transit of 1631, he was however able to witness several transits of Mercury the first of which he accurately predicted. There were many attempts to obtain exact timings for transits of Venus in the 18th and 19th centuries although this was complicated by the black drop effect, an apparent "sticky" entrance and exit of the Suns' disk by the dark image of the planet. This is possibly caused by the atmosphere of Venus and first noted in the 18th century. However the efforts of observers of the transit of 1769 produced a value for Earth- Sun distance of 153million Km which is only 1% more than the Earths' actual maximum and 2% above its' mean distance. Tony told members about the ill fortunes of the French astronomer Guillaume Legentil who set out for India in 1760 intent on observing the 1761 transit of Venus. Unable to land at his chosen destination because of the war with England, he was forced to try to view the transit from the ship, a hopeless task. Rather than return home he decided to remain in the east and wait for the transit of 1769. But his wait was in vain, despite several fine days before, on the day of the transit it was cloudy. On the return journey to France he was shipwrecked twice and on arriving home after eleven years he found he had been presumed dead and his relatives had inherited all of his property. Fortunately for science others had been more successful, including those of Charles Green, an assistant at Greenwich and Captain James Cook on Tahiti. Sadly Green died on the return journey. By viewing from different latitudes and making accurate timings a narrow triangle can be obtained which enables the distance of the transiting planet and of the Sun to be calculated. Thus not only the size of the Solar System is known but a basic astronomical measurement, the Astronomical Unit, the distance between the Earth and Sun, can be used to measure the distance of the nearer stars. Two AU form a base of the mean diameter of the Earths' orbit for a triangle to the stars which can be several light years long and from the characteristics of some of the stars thus measured the greater distances of similar stars can be estimated. The refined measurement of transits was the first step in measuring the Universe.

Gary Walker has sent his notes from his observing log: On August 29th 2011, through my Solar Max 40 telescope, I saw a large prominence curving up and over the solar limb at about the 12'oclock position. I saw it first at c.12.15 pm, and it seemed to have extended even further by 1.58pm. It was now arching above a very bright "blister" like prominence nearby.. By 4.30pm, or earlier, this prominence had gone. This must be about the largest prominence that I’ve seen! From about July 28th-early August, with my 8"SCT, I saw a splendid "chain" of large sunspots extending across most of the Sun's diameter (remember it is 864,000 miles in diameter!). They covered about 0.75% of the Sun's diameter. These consisted of about 3 separate groups. ----------- I have seen the Comet Garradd on 2 different nights. I first saw it on August 3rd 2011, about 1 degree from the globular cluster M15. I saw it again on August 26th, very close to the globular cluster M71. It must have only have been about 10 arc minutes from M71, so were easily visible in eyepiece fields of view - I could fit them in with magnifications of 166X-222X with my 8" SCT. Both M71 and the comet appeared of about the same magnitude (M71 is magnitude 8.3), but the objects of course were of different types. The comet appeared as a fuzz ball, with a small bright centre to it, but no tail. The comet is predicted, anyway, to be of magnitude 8, at present, so it is behaving according to predictions. This comet is not particularly impressive, but its close passage to M71 was! CAPE VERDE MAY 2011 In early May,4 intrepid members, your Chairman, Treasurer, Richard Etherington and Louis Barman joined a cattle class flight to Cape Verde, 300 miles west of The Gambia for a week on Boa Vista to see things you cannot see from the UK; arrival at airport was an experience-the smallest I have ever seen with 23 international flights a week!! This island,one of a dozen, is a mix of a bit of the Sahara and volcanic mountains and has 2 miles of tarmac roads and the rest dirt; the hotel was simple but very good value and servrd wonderful fish! The whole purpose of going was to see the southern skies which we saw very well, though there was more cloud than I had anticipated but the steady force 6 winds kept them moving. We had 5 inch dob,70 mm dob and 2.4 inch refractor and binos.The things we will all remember are: Omega Centauri - the BEST globular,clearly visible to naked eye Scorpius and Sagittarius at at about 50 degrees-M6 and M7 stunning and all the M objects in the latter Alpha and Beta Centauri at about 15 degrees Kappa Crucis and Crux itself The double red supernova which proved to be the top of a radio mast!!

The triple conjunction of Mars, Venus and Jupiter at 5.30 AM I would certainly go again, in November or December to see the Magellanic clouds OBSERVING SESSIONS IN SURREY There have been a number of sessions, mainly at Ranmore Common where the sky conditions are excellent-mag 5.5 and no light pollution.The milky way has been very clear and objects in the south have been visisble to declination 36 degrees south-what a shame we cannot bend it down to see Omega Cent!! Mike Fantham found the supernova in M101 On two occasionse we have met two chaps with a 16 inch dob, which showed the Veil Nebula and M27, which I have never seen before If you have not yet joined us do so-it os only half an hour away and is far better than Headley ------------ EWELL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY CONTACTS LIST: CONTACTS: Chairman- Richard Gledhill 0208 393 1068 Secretary- Angela Taggart 07801261751-angespurs@btinternet.com Webmaster Mike Wright 0208 568 1646 salandmike@blueyonder.co.uk Janus editor- Mike Wright salandmike@blueyonder.co.uk I have been lucky enough to be given the post of ‘website editor’. First of all, I would like to thank Maurice for all the hard work he has done with the present site, not to mention giving up his personal time needed to maintain the website. Maurice has also given up his personal web space to provide us with a site that is informative, comprehensive, and easy on the eye. If you type the word nytecam into the search engine of your computer you will find that Maurice is very active on the web, providing the world with a tremendous amount of informative and interesting video. I urge you to try this and see the stuff he has produced. I have decided to change the layout of the website, not so much presenting new information, just delivering it in a new way.

There is a gallery section to the new web site where your astro images can be displayed for the rest of the club members to see and enjoy. If you have any pictures you would like to see on the world wide web then e-mail them to me if they are digital, or give them to me by hand if they are hard copy and we should be able to get them scanned, and with a little help from Photoshop we can get them onto the website for all to enjoy. There is also a link to our Face book site which is very interesting. Plans for the site in the future include integrating a ‘forum’ where we can all discuss whatever with each other online in real time (well, almost !), and also an area where the general public can also have access to discuss things with us! It will be discussed by the committee the suggestion that the site could be made e-commerce enabled allowing members to pay their subscriptions on line, and accept new members online. Well that’s the plan anyway..lets see how she goes! -------------- JIM’S RANTING AGAIN!..For some time now having listened to my ramblings Mike has requested me to do 'a rant ' on some of my ideas and opinions so here goes. One of the real bees in my bonnet is the gullibility of people to the power of marketing and as we are approaching Christmas whatever the time of year it is, the marketing industry has us all in its sights and the nearer we get to it the bombardment gets more intense; after all how can we expect to enjoy Christmas if we do not buy the marketed item that will cost a fistful of money up to 24th December and yet when the shops reopen after no more than two days, can be got for a fraction of the price and stored in the attic for the next eleven months and twenty eight days needing no more than a dusting off. On the same subject why do people in the run up to Christmas have to stock with enough food to feed an army when shops are open so soon afterwards? One of the usual answers is that relatives or friends might call who haven’t eaten for the last fortnight and would like something to eat as they are all suffering from mal-nutrition. Another thing I hear people moaning about in January/February after the envelopes with windows have started hitting the doormats is 'what did we spend all that money on?' when all they have to do is look in their dustbins at all of the wasted food and broken toys. Needless to say in nine or ten months time they will be back on the same treadmill. A very good friend of mine who spent his life as a school teacher told me that he could always tell the children from the poorest homes by what they came to school with after Christmas, not because their families were trying to compensate for their circumstances but because they had got their priorities wrong. Another very good friend of mine who has four children and in today’s financial climate finds as a family it is better off for him to remain at home as the 'house husband' maintains that the children get all that they need but not all that they want, my impression is that it is one of the happiest households it has been my good fortune to visit. The history of Christmas is quiet complex as the actual date is not recorded although scientists who follow our interest have calculated that it was a planetary conjunction in about September, six B.C., however with the spread of Christianity the move towards converting the pagan masses from their Winter Solstice festivals of drunkenness greed and debauchery to the 'goodness' of Christianity December 25th. was adopted. So maybe it has come full circle thanks to the marketing industry. After all, the bulk of big business that profit from Christmas are not even Christians; ask yourself who owns stores like Harrods or the bulk of the jewellery trade?.

As it says in the Bible 'Man can not live on bread alone' so the marketing industry can not live on Christmas alone. After all, the finest products that can be bought in the supermarket or anywhere are the highly advertised items; we know that because the T/V and newspaper adds tell us so, don’t we?. However I have for a long time been using supermarket brands and would be hard pressed to distinguish between branded products and supermarket's own brand. There was an occasion not that long ago when somebody I knew bought some of these 'wonder yogurts' that we are led to believe are so wonderful that we would be justified in asking how did we ever manage without them? As luck would have it I was due to see my G.P. shortly afterwards and asked for his opinion to which the response was 'the best thing he could say about them was that would do no harm'. It also begs the question if these items that are not even sold in a pharmacy have any medicinal value over and above a sensible and balanced diet and lifestyle. Having said that if I am unfortunate enough to have a head cold I reckon to treat it with Fisherman’s Friend and Vapour Rub(imitation Vick) also maybe a bottle that definitely would have no place on a pharmacists shelf. Perhaps now I will give my personal analysis on items like home entertainment; the current ongoing development in T/V is a good example. When the market is flooded with the current “IN ITEM” i.e. H/D, and the price comes down to what stragglers like myself are willing to pay, while my once wonder T/V is still performing no worse than when new the next must have will be 3D. Once again when the market is flooded no doubt it will be 3D that does not need viewing glasses. So far I can’t think of anything to follow on from there but no doubt, if it is not already on the drawing board the industry will come up with something that we cannot possibly dream of surviving without. An item that I find beyond belief is that in countries with good infrastructure the amount of bottled water that is bought by the gullible when there is perfectly good drinking water to be had from our domestic taps. Who would have imagined twenty to thirty years ago that whole supermarket aisles would be filled with bottles of H2-O. It surely must make more minds than mine boggle. Some time ago I went on a holiday to South East Asia and was advised by the tour operator to take water purifying tablets to use with the local tap water as it was more environmentally friendly. It was also kinder on my pocket and I am still here to tell the tale. Equally fashion is a great source of market pressure. Some time ago a relation of mine who I had not seen for some time turned up in something quiet hideous and on me giving my equally tactless and unwelcome opinion the response was that this was the in thing to be seen in. No doubt in twelve months time something different would be 'the in thing' and all the in people would be wearing that, the other items being consigned to the bin. Why not hang on to these items as they are sure to be in again when the fashion industry has recycled all of its previous in items. House furnishings follow a similar line after as when nearly every home in the land was not complete without fitted carpet that the trend became laminated or wood flooring. It must be getting near time for fitted carpets to be wonderful again or perhaps is there something even more wonderful up somebody’s sleeve waiting to take the market by storm? Another great coup of the marketing industry is Mothering Sunday; how could anybody be as mean as not to buy a gift for their mother because the marketing people tell them to do so; does not moral blackmail spring to mind the price of flowers in the days leading up to Mothering Sunday is astronomical compared to a week later when the florists nearly have a job to give them away. If you have got this far with my wafflings maybe it is not as bad as I feared. Maybe Mike will even put it in Janus as a tribute to my somewhat cynical view of society; after all, without clever marketing how would most of us be able to fill our lives, homes and dustbins with overpriced unnecessary items that we could not imagine living without and at the same time scrimping and scraping so that millionaires have the really important things in life like a villa and a yacht; no doubt sold to them by clever marketing means.!

PARTING SHOT: