Jerry Stone FBIS, FRAS The image is of an early version of Island Zero © Adam Manning 50 years ago, the work of Gerard O’Neill resulted in plans for large-scale space habitats that could house upwards of 10,000 people. Such a structure would rotate to produce simulated gravity at 1g or possibly less. Jerry Stone […]
Join us for a packed day of talks exploring early British Photography and the work of John Herschel and Henry Fox Talbot at the BRLSI and on Zoom Early British photography was rooted in the experimentation of Henry Talbot, John Herschel and their extended family, scientific and artistic networks, and the French daguerreotype process. Talbot’s […]
Dr Andrew Wilson, University of Exeter The image is a photo of the young star cluster and nebula IC 1396 © Dr Andrew Wilson Our modern ideas about star formation date back to Immanuel Kant’s nebular hypothesis of 1755. Over the past 270 years, advances in telescopes and computing have allowed us to confirm and […]
Dr Alfredo Carpineti The image is of the Crab Nebula (Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Dubner (IAFE, CONICET-University of Buenos Aires) et al.; A. Loll et al.; T. Temim et al.; F. Seward et al.; VLA/NRAO/AUI/NSF; Chandra/CXC; Spitzer/JPL-Caltech; XMM-Newton/ESA; and Hubble/STScI). There is much more to the universe that meets the eye. In this lecture, we […]
Interdisciplinary perspectives, visual arts practice and the curation of ‘Cosmos: The Art of Observing Space’ Ione Parkin RWA The main image is Dust – Gas – Light (oil on canvas) © Ione Parkin Bath-based visual artist Ione Parkin RWA presents a richly-illustrated talk, discussing the curation of the art-science exhibition Cosmos: the Art of Observing […]
JWST’s transformational observations of Uranus and Neptune Professor Tom Stallard, Northumbria University (speaking remotely from Northumberland) The image is the first Neptune auroral observation since Voyager, and the starting point for our observations. At the left, an enhanced-color image of Neptune from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. At the right, that image is combined with data […]
Professor Clive Ruggles, University of Leicester The image is © English Heritage/André Pattenden, The connection between Stonehenge and summer solstice sunrise is well known, but decades of over-speculation, by both astronomers and archaeologists, concerning the use of the monument for observations of the sky have led many to steer well clear of the subject. In […]
Dr Heather Fenwick Johnston, University of Exeter The image is © NASA, ESA, CSA, Jupiter ERS Team; image processing by Judy Schmidt Giant planets like Jupiter play a key role in shaping the architecture of planetary systems. However, they make up only a tiny fraction of the 5,000+ exoplanets known today. Giant planets are found […]
Anthony Symes, Herschel Society Friday 5th September 2025 7.30 pm in the BRLSI, Bath, and on Zoom The image is a portrait, supposedly of Thomas Harriot, which is at Trinity College, Oxford. Thomas Harriot was not only the first in England to be documented as pointing a telescope at the night sky and drawing the […]
The Caroline Herschel Prize Lecture 7 pm Thursday 20th November 2025 at 10E 0.17 Lecture Theatre, University of Bath and online Dr Victoria Fawcett, University of Newcastle Dr Victoria Fawcett, University of Newcastle Dr Fawcett is a Research Associate at Newcastle University. She works on quasars and how they influence their host galaxies. She has […]