Friday 7th November 2025 Creatures of Reason – John Herschel and the Invention of Science

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Dr Stephen Case

Friday 7th October 2025 7.30 pm in the BRLSI, Bath, and on Zoom, note that the lecture will be given remotely from the U.S. For those at the BRSLI Dr Case will be “beamed in” to the big screen.

The image is of the Dr Stephen Case’s book of the same title.

Apart from his work in astronomy, John Herschel made important contributions to mathematics, optics, geology, photography, and chemistry. Perhaps most lasting though was the role Herschel played in defining what it meant to “do science” or “be scientific” in the Victorian period. Over the course of his early career, Herschel became a prime mover in the European scientific community, gaining wide influence and credibility that his father– despite his remarkable telescopic discoveries– never achieved. 

In this talk, I show how John Herschel’s education, travel, correspondence, and pivotal roles in both the Astronomical Society of London and the Royal Society, including his failed bid for Royal Society presidency, culminated in the publication of his Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. Through this text and his own career, Herschel gave natural philosophy the contours of modern science.

Stephen Case, PhD, is a historian of science and professor in the department of Chemistry and the Geosciences at Olivet Nazarene University. He is the author of Making Stars Physical: the Astronomy of Sir John Herschel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) and Creatures of Reason: John Herschel and the Invention of Science (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024) and is co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to John Herschel (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

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

Herschel Society Members receive a discount code in the announcement that is mailed to them.

Thursday 20th November 2025 Unveiling the secrets of hidden supermassive black holes

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The 2025 Caroline Herschel Prize Lecture at the University of Bath (Time and location to be announced)

Dr Victoria Fawcett, University of Newcastle


Description…

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 demonstrated excellence in research, including a strong publication record, and co-leadership of the working group on active galactic nuclei within the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration. She is is an exceptional role model and promoter of increasing diversity in Astronomy and Physics. She also has an outstanding track record in outreach and communication, focussed on young people in the North East of England. She speaks with great clarity and enthusiasm in public talks, and her lecture topic should be of great interest.

Tickets : free, but instructions for registration will be available shortly.

Friday 5th December 2025 Thomas Harriot, Renaissance Astronomer, Navigator and Mathematician

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Anthony Symes, Herschel Society

Friday 5th September 2025 7.30 pm in the BRLSI, Bath, and on Zoom

The image is a portrait, supposedly be 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.

Tickets (£8 or £4 for BRLSI or Herschel Society members and students, proceeds to the BRLSI) available here.

Herschel Society Members receive a discount code in the announcement that is mailed to them.

Thursday 8th January 2026 The Grand Tour of Ice Giant Aurorae

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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 from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

When the Voyager II spacecraft flew past Uranus and Neptune in 1986 and 1989, respectively, it reveals a strange new type of world, somewhere between the Gas Giants of Jupiter and Saturn, and rocky terrestrial planets like Earth and Mars. These worlds, made from ices for most of their depth, but with deep atmospheres, were unique in their magnetic fields.  Unlike Earth’s ‘bar-magnet’ like magnetic field (and the magnetic fields of Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn), these worlds had strangely complex magnetic fields, with four poles, perhaps even eight, magnetic poles (2 north and 2 south).  Though unlike anything else in our current solar system, these fields seem to be very much like the fields that Earth itself produced during past magnetic field reversals, making them of great interest in understanding both Earth’s past and the many variant planetary magnetic fields around other stars.

But, since Voyager, these planets have been hidden from view. A handful of Hubble Space Telescope observations have weakly sampled the UV aurora of Uranus when they are strongest, but we have never observed the aurora of Neptune in the past 35 years.  JWST has changed all that – this incredible telescope can not only show these aurora at the edge of our solar system, we instead see brilliant views of both the aurora and the entire surrounding upper atmosphere, laying out not only aurorae but also the magnetic fields across the planet. So far we have observed Uranus twice and Neptune once.

In November 2025 and January 2026, we are undertaking a Grand Tour of Neptune then Uranus. Watching these planets for an entire month, we will see how the aurora of these worlds change across a solar day, as the Solar Wind, filled with regions of compressed and rarefied wind, reaches and distorts the magnetic fields of these worlds.  In doing so, we’ll massively improve our understanding of the aurora of Uranus, and for Neptune, we will literally increase the total number of auroral images ten-fold. It is the largest JWST planetary observation ever made: we will be revealing the latest images and talk about what we think we’ve discovered so far.

Professor Tom Stallard, Northumbria University

Tom Stallard is a Professor of Astrophysics at Northumbria University, UK. He is a leading planetary astronomer in the UK, who currently has the largest number of JWST hours of any planetary astronomer in the world. In 2019, he was awarded the
Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) Chapman medal for his research into planetary aurora. He has shared his astronomy with the wider public in a range of ways, including RAS  ‘live from the observatory’ events. He was presented with the title ‘Hoku Kolea’ by the Mauna Kea observatories for his work in public engagement.

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

Herschel Society Members receive a discount code in the announcement that is mailed to them.