Sun, 15 Jul 2012

SPA London meeting this Saturday

You may use the Faulkes Telescope on Hawaii

There's a regular SPA meeting in London this coming Saturday, 21 July. This is being held a week early to try and avoid the worst of the Olympic traffic, and although there will be some traffic changes in the area, as far as we can tell there will be no changes to pedestrian access from Russell Square station to the SPA meeting.

The main speaker will be Professor Paul Roche (University of Glamorgan), on The Universe in the Classroom: Robotic Astronomy in the 21st Century. Already, schools and some amateur astronomers are able to use giant telescopes from their home computers, and the use of these facilities will increase in the next few years. Dr Roche will give the audience an online tour of the Faulkes Telescopes website, and show how you can access a huge data archive and software to help analyse it, all for free.

Also speaking will be Robin Scagell, on coming events in the night sky, and Richard Fleet, on Night Sky Glows. He will be showing spectacular photos of various atmospheric and astronomical phenomena in the sky that are not usually covered in the standard astronomy books.

The meeting starts at 2 pm promptly, with a break halfway through for refreshments which may be purchased at the student union (or you may bring your own – no Olympic-style bans on bringing your own drinks to the SPA!).

Full details of the how to get to the meeting are given here.

Added by: Robin Scagell