Entries by Tony Symes

Friday 4th March 2022 BRLSI in-person lecture also available online

The James Webb: The Next Generation of Hubble Telescope

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Professor Martin WardEmeritus Temple Chevallier Professor of Astronomy at Durham University. Image credit: (c) National Aeronautics and Space Administration The Hubble Space Telescope has become an icon of Astronomy and it is now more than 30 years old. The new and much more powerful James Webb Space Telescope will soon extend our frontiers of observation. […]

Friday 4th February 2022 BRLSI Zoom lecture projected at the BRLSI and delivered from California

A Tour of the Dynamic Universe

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Dr Jeffrey ScargleNASA Ames Research Center, retired. Image credit: (c) National Aeronautics and Space Administration Casual observation of the night sky leads one to view the Universe as well-ordered and stable, changing only in minor ways and regularly, smoothly and predictably at that. Even intensive study with telescopes — starting with Galileo, and including William […]

Thursday 18 November 2021 7 – 8.30 pm online only, The Caroline Herschel Prize Lecture 2021 – Earth versus Sun: a precarious relationship in Space

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Sponsored by the Herschel Society, the University of Bath and the Royal Astronomical Society Dr Jenny Carter, University of Leicester The video recording of this lecture is now freely available on the Bath University YouTube channel. Please go the following link to view it. https://bath.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=cac0cc8e0532cc1f0d8b4f42b&id=f05887de26&e=ff5a10df75

Friday 1st October 2021 at 7.30 pm on Zoom and at the BRLSI Life on Mars? A Short History of 19th-Century Exploration of the Red Planet

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Dr Joshua NallCurator of Modern Sciences at the University of Cambridge’s Whipple Museum of the History of Science Image: (c) Whipple Museum, University of Cambridge (Wh. 6211) Humans have long been intrigued by the possibility that Mars might harbour life. Planetary scientists nowadays continue to hunt for evidence of it, and space technologists even advocate […]

Friday 7th May 2021 at 7.30 pm on Zoom

The Search for Advanced Extraterrestrial Civilisations via Anomalies in Astronomical Survey Data

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Prof. Michael (Mike) GarrettUniversity of ManchesterJodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics Image credit: NASA Energy-intensive civilisations are likely to have a significant impact on both their local and extended environments – we already see evidence for this here on Earth. Advanced technical civilisations may reveal themselves to other civilisations by introducing anomalous signals into astronomical data. […]

Friday 9th April 2021 at 7.30pm on Zoom,

Hipparcos and Gaia: space astrometry — unravelling the formation and evolution of our Galaxy

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Dr Michael Perryman Image credit: ESA–D. Ducros, 2013 The Hipparcos satellite project of the European Space Agency was dedicated to measuring the accurate positions of more than 100,000 stars. Doing so from space represented a fundamentally new discipline in space science. With the publication of the scientific results from the Hipparcos mission in 1997, ESA […]

Friday 5th March at 7.30 pm on Zoom

NASA’s Juno Mission to Jupiter

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Dr. Fran BagenalLaboratory for Atmospheric and Space PhysicsUniversity of Colorado, Boulder Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Juno’s principal goal is to understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter. Underneath its dense cloud cover, Jupiter safeguards secrets to the fundamental processes and conditions that governed our solar system during its formation. As our primary example of a giant […]