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 Moon (just before Galileo in Venice) but was also a navigator who had sailed to North America to set up the first English colony at Roanoke Island, had learnt the Carolina Algonquian language and had written a book about what he found: A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Later he went on to make a study of sunspots, and he left numerous manuscripts which paved the way forward to Newton in Mathematics and Optics.

When a portion of court intrigue and Harriot’s connections with other key Elizabethan and Jacobean figures is added in, the result is a story which needs to be told.

Tony Symes is keen, as an enthusiastic amateur, to talk about this all too often forgotten scientist and reveal the background against which he was operating.

This is our second contribution to the 2025-26 BRLSI Renaissance theme.

Anthony Symes CEng is a committee member of the Herschel Society and chairs the Programme Subcommittee at the BRLSI. He graduated in Physics at the University of Sussex and worked in IT, mainly on supervisory control systems.

A video recording of this lecture will be available shortly.

Penllergare Equatorial Observatory

Stuart Rice, General Manager, The Penllergare Trust

Tuesday 11th February 2025 7.30 pm in the BRLSI, Bath, and on Zoom

The image is a view of the observatory © Stuart Rice

John Dillwyn Llewelyn presented his daughter, Thereza, with an Observatory on her 16th birthday, helping spark a family interest in astronomy and astrophotography. This very observatory was used by the father-daughter duo to take one of the earliest photographs of the moon; John worked the camera and Thereza moved the telescope for a longer exposure time.

The family had connections with John Herschel whose interests included both astronomy and the chemistry of photography and William Henry Fox Talbot from nearby Lacock, the photography pioneer. In addition to early astrophotography, John Dillwyn Llewelyn’s pioneering photography included charming informal family groups.

The Penllergare Trust is now in the process of trying to restore the building and give it the opportunity to inspire future generations.

Stuart Rice will provide an overview of the family’s pioneering work in astrophotography and the Trust’s journey to restore the Observatory as a future planetarium.

Stuart Rice (General Manager, Penllergare Trust) has led the ambitious project to save, restore and safeguard the building for future generations.

Tickets (£6 or £3 for BRLSI or Herschel Society members and students, proceeds to the BRLSI) available here.

Hugh Allen

2024 is the bicentenary of the birth of Sir William Huggins, the Victorian pioneer of astronomical spectroscopy. The talk is a celebration of William’s life and work, and also of the contribution of his wife and scientific collaborator Margaret Huggins. By using extracts from William and Margaret’s scientific papers and correspondence, and illustrated with some of the speaker’s own astronomical spectra, Hugh will bring to life the birth of astrophysics.

Hugh Allen MA (Cantab)

Hugh is an industrial chemist with a lifelong interest in amateur astronomy. He is Chairman of the Wells & Mendip Astronomers and a member of the Herschel Society, and is a regular speaker keen to share a passion for astronomical spectroscopy.

A recording will be available here soon.

Elisabetta Strickland

Friday 1st March 2024 7.30 pm in the BRLSI, can be attended either in the BRLSI or remotely on Zoom

Part of a BRLSI series of events around International Women’s Day to celebrate Extraordinary Women.

The image is at Somerville College, the artist is James Rannie Swinton (1844).
Photo credit: Somerville College, University of Oxford (CC BY-NC).

It is an astonishing experience to go back in time and explore the world where study and research for women were forbidden by law. The fascinating life of the Scottish scientist and popular writer Mary Fairfax Somerville (1780-1872) brings us back in this past and, in the same time, describes the fight of one great dame for equal rights and opportunities for women. Her fight was not political, in a sense that she did not try to influence the public opinion with her words or her actions, but by winning the respect of the scientific world. Her extraordinary mathematical talent only came to light through fortuitous circumstances. Barely taught to read and write as a child, all the science she learned and mastered was self taught. By giving this example of scientific competence, she backed the struggle towards education opportunities for women that lead to their access to schools. The Somerville College in Oxford was named in her honor in 1879 and produced famous graduates like Dorothy Hodgkin, Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher.

Elisabetta STRICKLAND is honorary professor at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”. She has been Vice-President of the National Institute of Advanced Mathematics (INdAM) from 2007 to 2015. From 2014 to 2022 she has been a member of the Women in Mathematics Committee (WIM) of the European Mathematical Society. She is Honorary President of the Central Committee for the promotion of equal opportunities, workers’ welfare and non discrimination (CUG) of the University of Rome “Tor Vergata”. She is also co-founder of the Gender Interuniversity Observatory GIO over the state Universities in Rome. Since 2016 she is Ambassador of Italy in the Committee of Women in Mathematics (CWM) of the International Mathematical Union.

In 2013 she has been awarded from the Capitoline Administration the Prize “Excellent Women in Rome”.

A recording will be available in April 2024.

Please note that you can also buy tickets for the whole BRLSI Extraordinary Women programme through the above link. A list of all the talks with links to more information can be found here.

Friday 2 December 2022 7.30 pm BRLSI in-person and Zoom lecture

Michael Perryman
Adjunct Professor, University College Dublin

This talk examines the question of whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe. The simple answer is that we do not know. But by looking at the huge numbers of stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy and beyond, the vast numbers of planets now known to exist around them, and the immense age of the Universe throughout which life might have developed, we can formulate the question in a different way: if alien civilisations have developed elsewhere, surely we might see some sorts of evidence for their existence? In 1950, the distinguished physicist Enrico Fermi famously formulated the paradox as ‘Where is everybody?’. Others have referred to it as the ‘Great Silence’ problem. It turns out to be a deceptively simple question that presents a challenge for theories assuming a naturalistic origin of life and intelligence, and possibly one with some alarming conclusions.  I will look at the problem in a number of ways, including:  What is life? Do we have any ideas of how common life, or intelligent life might be? Is the Earth special in the conditions under which life on our planet formed?  What sorts of searches for life are being carried out today?  And if we find nothing, what are the implications of one possible conclusion: that we are alone in the Universe…

Michael Perryman obtained a degree in physics, and a PhD in radio astronomy, at Cambridge University. During a 30-year career with the European Space Agency, he was the scientific leader of the Hipparcos space astrometry mission between 1981-1997, and of the follow-on Gaia space astrometry mission between 1995-2008. He was Professor of Astronomy at Leiden University, The Netherlands, between 1993-2009, and has received various awards for his leadership of space astrometry, including the Gold Medal of the French Astronomical Society, the Academy Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Tycho Brahe Prize of the European Astronomical Society, and the international Shaw Prize in Astronomy 2022. He has held a position as Adjunct Professor, University College Dublin since 2013.

This lecture was not recorded.