Welcome to Astronomy in Herefordshire

Next Talk - Virtual Meeting - Thursday 5th December 2024

We are delighted to welcome Owen Brazell back to HAS to give us his talk on Observing Globular Clusters.

Owen is President, Director of the Galaxies Section, Joint Meetings Organiser and DSO Editor for The Webb Society. He has previously been the Assistant Director of the British Astronomical Association's Deep Sky Section and is a columnist for Astronomy Now. 

When observing, his primary interests are in the observation of planetary and diffuse nebulae - although since the acquisition of a 51cm telescope this has also moved to viewing galaxy clusters.

His interest in astronomy was sparked by an attempt to see a comet from his native Toronto. From early years, he kept up his interest in astronomy which culminated in a degree in astronomy from St Andrews University in Scotland and taking though not completing an MSc in Astrophysics. At that time, he also gained an interest in the northern lights. As with many astronomers, finding no living there, he moved into the oil business first in R&D and then as a computer systems designer (this explains his interest in the computer side of astronomy). Despite this he still uses Dobsonian type telescopes ranging from a 4" Genesis-sdf through a 21". The recent plethora of fuzzy objects that move has re-awakened an interest in comets!

His searches for dark skies have taken him from the mountains of Canada through Texas to the Florida Keys as well as to Wales - the only good dark sky site he has found so far in the UK.

Have a look around The Webb Society website here and there's information about the Deep-Sky Observer (DSO) quarterly magazine here.

BTW, we have a particular soft spot for the  Reverend Thomas William Webb here in Herefordshire. The Reverend Webb was born in Ross-on-Wye, educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, ordained and later assigned to  the parish of Hardwicke, Hereford.  Here he wrote his classic astronomical observing guide "Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes" published in 1859 for which he is best known today. He is buried in the Holy Trinity Parish Church in Whitecross Road.

Some HAS members may even remember a talk given on 6th November 2008 (the 1st Annual Webb lecture!) where Janet and Mark Robinson described the life of the Revd Webb taken from their book (with a foreword by Sir Patrick Moore) called 'The Stargazer of Hardwicke'.

More recently, in February 2020, the society went on a visit to Hanwell Community Observatory and Oxford's History of Science Museum. Here Dr Lee Macdonald showed us an original first edition of the Revd Webb's book "Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes". We have some photos of the trip here - scroll down on the link to have a look at us inspecting the book!

As always, look out for emails from Chris with details of what HAS is doing next. If you are not on our emailing list, please contact Chris for the latest news - contact details here.

Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS

Chris mentioned at our October talk that here is a comet exciting observers at the moment - Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. Visible after sunset, low down in the western skies - our members have reported it's difficult to see without binoculars - but worth it.

David has just submitted this wonderful image of the comet taken at about 7:30pm at home in Clyro. David used a ZWO ASI 533 camera with his 80mm f4.8 triplet scope. To build this image he took 27x 30 second photos stacked and processed.

We have been treated to some wonderful Auroral displays this year. Several members managed to capture the recent display on 10th October. 

Francis took this series of images from Kingstone sports field where the display started as a green/slightly blue dome to the north then gradually reds appeared from the east and spread across the sky until fading in the west. He used a static Nikon DSLR on a tripod with no filters. Exposures ranged from 6 to 30 seconds and varied depending on the ISO setting used. Aperture remained at f3.5:

and Chris took this series of images using his mast mounted all sky camera running continuous 30 second exposures:

Keith took a time sequence video of the last display on 10th October:

Keith has been peering (using suitable equipment) at the sun during the current "solar maximum" activity. Here's a lovely image of a solar flare with an overlaid image of earth to appreciate the scale of  these eruptions!

Here Keith has created an animation of a big and bright CME:

Francis has sent in a stunning image focusing on the Squid Nebula sitting inside the Flying Bat Nebula. This is a tough imaging target - one of Francis's longest imaging runs requiring 14.25 hours of scope time. With his dual imaging rig, this "only" took 7 hours of his time to capture the data. One scope captured Ha and OIII narrowband data, the other scope captured SII and OIII narrowband data. 

The image is built up from 171 sub frames of 5 minutes each. These are all processed and stacked using PixInsight software. To make the Squid really stand out, Francis created a mask the same shape as the squid to allow him to hold back or enhance the processing of the squid and it's background. Francis's processing workflow has him removing the stars from the stacked image early on so that he can get the nebulosity looking good, then adding the stars back in at the end to produce the final image. Fabulous! We've shown both the final image and the starless version below:

Keith has been out under the stars again and was lucky enough to have clear skies to view the wonderful Auroral displays in August. He's also been under Francis's tutelage to learn how to enhance a nebula image using PixInsight - dramatic improvement in clarity of the nebula. Lastly, Keith has captured the Tulip nebula SH2-101 in Cygnus:

NGC6888