2008 March 1

Deep Sky Section Annual Meeting

Century Hall, Shurdington Social Centre, Bishop Road, Shurdington, Cheltenham
Hosted by the Cotswold Astronomical Society

For directions to venue see http://www.shurdington.org/SocCtr/Location.htm

The final programme for the 2008 Deep Sky Section Meeting is shown below. There are a couple of changes to the previously advertised programme. Gain Lee has unfortunately had to pull out but his place has been taken by Owen Brazell (Assistant Director to the Deep Sky Section) who will give a talk on the Abell Planetary Nebula Project. It has also proved impossible to get anyone from the Galaxy Zoo project to talk to us.

Everyone welcome. Admission L7 payable at the door (to include refreshments).

For queries concerning the venue please contact Callum Potter This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Doors open 10am

10.30         Coffee

11.00 – 11.30  Welcome and Review of Year - Stewart Moore
11.30 – 12.15    Peter Grego - From Moon to Deep Sky, Sketching with a PDA
12.15 – 13.00    Paul Roche - Bringing the Deep Sky down to Earth: Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network

13.00         Lunch

14.30 – 15.15  Owen Brazell – The Abell Planetary Nebula Project
15.15 – 16.00  Callum Potter - Wide Field DSLR Imaging

16.00         Tea

16.30 – 17.15    Paul Downing - Galaxy Interactions and Peculiarities
17.15 – 17.30  Meeting round up - Stewart Moore

17.30    Close

The following sales stands hope to be in attendance:
BAA
Webb Deep Sky Society
SCS Astro
Aurora Books

Exhibitions of deep sky material by Section Members is encouraged.

Please contact the Callum Potter This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it if you want to have a display.

We look forward to seeing you on the day.

Venue:  Century Hall, Shurdington, Cheltenham, GL51 4TB
Organisers: Stewart Moore & Callum Potter 

The 2007 BAA Deep Sky Section meeting will take place on Saturday 3rd March at the Humfrey Rooms, Castilian Terrace, Northampton. The provisional programme is given below.

• High Definition Imaging of Planetary Nebulae - Andrea Tasselli
• A Pinch of SALT - Paul Clark
• Going Deep - Grant Privett
• Two-Colour Imaging of the Deep Sky - Richard Miles (BAA President)
• The Northern Sky H-Alpha Survey - Prof. Janet Drew (Imperial College, London)  

Hopefully there will be time after the main meeting for a few short talks by individuals wanting to discuss deep-sky related matters or give an update on their observing projects – please contact the Director if you wish to speak.

Admission to the meeting is £7 (payable at the door) which includes refreshments throughout the day and a leisurely buffet lunch with time for socialising.

Northampton is a relatively central location, both north / south and east / west, and is well served by road and rail connections, with frequent trains from London and plenty of car parking. Location map.

Display material is welcome from Section members and both the BAA sales stand and the Webb Society will be present. Doors will open at 10am with tea and coffee available from 10.30 and the meeting proper starting at 11am.  

The Annual Deep Sky Section meeting has a reputation for being an enjoyable, entertaining and relaxing day out and all BAA members and their guests are welcome to attend.

Section Annual Meeting held on 4th March 2006 in Northampton

The Deep Sky Section returned to Northampton again in 2006 for the annual meeting which took place on March 4 at the Humfrey Rooms, Castilian Terrace.

Nick Hewitt started a programme to observe Abell planetaries a few years ago and I would like to continue this, although so far there has been little response. These planetaries were discovered by George Abell in the 1950s examining the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS) plates. They are usually large and therefore very old (in planetary nebulae terms). None of the objects are easy, and visual observers in particular will generally need large telescopes, pristine skies and nebula filters.

The Section has had a programme for a while to monitor the behaviour of variable nebulae and I am keen to continue this. The erratic behaviour of these objects is not totally understood and a series of regular images is needed. Even if visual observers see nothing, that is still a valuable piece of information provided full details of telescope / observing conditions etc are noted.

Dave Green, an astronomer at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, in Cambridge, lists 235 galactic supernova remnants on his web site. Unfortunately, although this may be the true at radio wavelengths, the amateur visual observer or imager is rather hard done by and has to make do with only a handful of objects.

The Deep Sky Section Handbook No.2 - A Messier Catalogue - is now almost sold out. Although the data it contains is as relevant as ever, the handbook has a slightly dated look to it in an age when people expect to see glorious colour images in publications. The Messier objects are usually the first serious list of deep sky objects that a newcomer observes and I can still recall my thrill at completing the list.

I would like to collect images of as many local group galaxies as possible. There are over 40 in the group but the majority will probably be beyond the reach of amateurs. However, many are easy - M31 is naked eye and M33 can be from a good sky. There are others that are challenging but not impossible. For starters I suggest the following objects.

One of the most beautiful emission nebula in the summer sky must be the Veil in Cygnus. Always a target for imagers, the advent of nebular filters has turned the Veil into a visual showpiece object for owners of large telescopes at star parties. They have also allowed it to be seen in small refractors, where the wider field of view of the modern short focal length instrument will often allow both eastern and western parts of the Veil to be seen together. Under a good sky parts of the Veil are also readily visible in binoculars without a filter, and some observers in the USA even claim it is naked eye with an OIII filter. The late Walter Scott Houston, in his Sky &Telescope column, reported that experienced observers had detected it naked eye through a UHC filter.

Deep Sky Section Meeting 2005 - Meeting Report

Held at the Humfrey Rooms, Castilian Terrace, Northampton, 2005 March 5th

The 2005 Deep Sky Section meeting was the first to be conducted by Dr Stewart Moore, who had taken over from Nick Hewitt as Section Director at the 2004 meeting.