Public TalksMonthly Talks on Astronomical Topics of Interest |  |
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Monthly Public Talks
Our popular monthly talks are for members and the public to learn about some aspects of astronomy. These talks are aimed at ‘middle of the road’ level so the talk will appeal to members of the public with no prior knowledge, newcomers as well as those who have been interested in the subject for a number of years.
Topics from imaging the night sky, through to Cosmology, we invite speakers from all over the UK and the World.
We make a small charge on the door of £3.00 to cover our expenses
Our local venue:
Clanfield Memorial Hall,
South Lane,
Clanfield
Waterlooville
Hampshire
PO8 0RB
If you wish to view this location on MultiMap please click here
All talks start at 7:45pm unless otherwise stated
Friday, 8th June 2018
Blexit: Exiting the Universe via black hole
A talk by Dr Poshak Gandhi
Cost: £3 for non-members
Dr Gandhi is a member of the School of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Southampton.
Black holes are one-way doors, cutting matter off from the rest of the universe, but we still understand very little of how their lives. A new generation of fast mutiwavelength detectors is giving us fresh insight into how these objects grow through cycles of accretion and ejection of matter. I will show some of the latest observations of these enigmatic
objects from X-rays to the radio band, reviewing what we have learnt and what more remains to be done, and emphasise the important role that dedicated amateur astronomers can play.
Friday, 13th July 2018
Telescope choices based on optical and practical considerations
A talk by John D Timmins FRAS
Cost: £3 for non-members
Our speaker, John Timmins is the founder of Peak2Valley Instruments and is a Fellow of the RAS.
Friday, 12th October 2018
Making a Solar System: A Recipe for Worlds
A talk by Dr Ashley King
Cost: £3 to non-members
Our Founder's memorial lecture this year will be delivered by Dr Ashley King, who is currently a post-doc research assistant at the Natural History Museum (since 2012) and a post-doc research scholar at the University of Chicago, US (since 2010) .
The solar system formed from a cloud of gas and dust around 4.5 billion years ago. Astronomical observations allow us to witness the birth of distant stars and planets, however the recipe for our own solar system is recorded in primitive extra-terrestrial materials. These include cometary samples returned by NASA's Stardust mission, or collected in the Earth's stratosphere as fluffy interplanetary dust particles, and meteorites ejected from the surfaces of asteroids.
Dr King will talk about how we are using cutting-edge analytical techniques to unlock the secrets of primitive extra-terrestrial materials, revealing details about the earliest conditions in the solar system and how the raw ingredients came together to form asteroids, comets and planets.
Friday, 9th November 2018
Title TBC
A talk by Dr Paul B Rimmer
Cost: £3 for non-members
Dr Rimmer is a Postdoc at University of Cambridge Cavendish Astrophysics Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
Details of his talk will follow later.
Friday, 14th December 2018
How We'll Live on Mars
A talk by Colin Stuart
Cost: £3 for non-members
Humans will soon make their first trip to Mars.Friday, 11th January 2019
The Cradle of the Sun - Did Our Solar System Form in a Star Cluster?
A talk by Dr Richard J Parker
Cost: £3 for non-members
Dr Parker is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow, working at the University of Sheffield who delivered a talk about the "Search for Planet 9" at the 2018 BAA Winchester Weekend. For this talk, he will be considering where our Sun was born.
Stars like the Sun do not form in isolation, but rather in the company of tens to millions of other stars. These stellar birth-places are often very hostile astrophysical environments, where planets can be disrupted or prevented from forming altogether. However, there are several strands of evidence that suggest the Sun MUST have formed in such a dense environment. In this talk, I will discuss the evidence for and against the Solar System's formation within a star cluster.
