Category for past lectures/events with recordings and/or text version available.

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.

A video recording of the this talk is available here.

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 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 is available here.

Thursday 20th November 2025 Unveiling the secrets behind supermassive black holes

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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 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.

A link to the recording of this lecture is available here.

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 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).

A video recording of this lecture is available here.

Friday 3rd October 2025 Tycho Brahe and the Restoration of Astronomy

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Dr Emma Perkins


This Wikimedia image is of a mural showing Tycho Brahe taking celestial measurements in a Quadrant, and is from the Danish Royal Library.


From his island observatory funded by the Danish king, astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) conducted a systematic programme of observation that would lay the foundations for significant astronomical innovations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet while his empirical approach resonates with modern scientific sensibilities, Tycho’s view was retrospective: he aimed at no less than the restoration of astronomy. In this he was inspired, like many of his Renaissance counterparts, by the example of the ancient world. This lecture will explore the ways in which Tycho looked to the past to inform his own practices, which were themselves motivated by contemporary debates within the discipline of astronomy. .

Dr Emma Perkins, University of Cambridge

Emma Perkins is a Teaching Associate in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and a Fellow of Newnham College at the University of Cambridge. Her main interests are in early modern astronomy, especially its visual and material culture and systems of patronage.

A video recording of this lecture is available here.

Friday 2nd May 2025 The Chemistry of the Universe

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The Davy lecture (The Royal Society of Chemistry)

Professor Mike G. Edmunds

Friday 2nd May 2025 7.30 pm in the BRLSI, Bath, and on Zoom

The infrared image of the Eagle Nebula was obtained using JWST. Stars are born inside the dense, blue-gray “pillars of creation” – vast clouds of dense interstellar gas and dust. Accredited to NASA.


There is the real and fascinating probability that in the future we will be confronted with extraterrestrial worlds whose physical conditions and compositions result in chemistries radically different from our own. This is the Humphry Davy Lecture, first given at the Royal Society of Chemistry in London last autumn.  It outlines our current knowledge of the origin and distribution of the elements in the universe, as we try to push as far as we can into astronomical environments where complex chemistry is taking place. Currently we believe we have a remarkably good understanding of the processes and astronomical sites that have led to the formation of the elements in the periodic table. Except for hydrogen, some helium and a little lithium, all of them have been synthesised since the beginning of the universe. Recent spectroscopic observations to high redshifts are enabling us to follow their build up in galaxies from back in the earliest times to the present. The discovery of many planetary systems beyond the Solar System, and the investigation of dense interstellar environments, imply a huge unexplored range of chemical possibilities and may lead to profound implications for life in the Universe. It is suggested that extensive theoretical investigation of these enticing possibilities may be both possible and necessary.


Mike Edmunds is Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics at Cardiff University, and the immediate past-President of the Royal Astronomical Society.  He was educated at Cambridge, but has lived and worked in Wales for fifty years. His research career involved the determination and interpretation of the abundances of the chemical elements in the Universe – particularly through spectroscopy of galaxies – and investigation of the origin of interstellar dust. Later work has been in the history of astronomy, including the ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism. He was a member of two UK Research Councils. He is a Vice-President of the Herschel Society and an Honorary Vice-President of the Society for the History of Astronomy. He can occasionally be seen in his one-man play about Newton – ‘Sir Isaac Remembers…’. He was the subject of BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Life Scientific’ in April 2024, also appearing on “In Our Time” in November.

A video recording of this lecture is available here.

Friday 11th April 2025 Robert Hooke FRS – A half-forgotten scientific genius

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Professor Alan Bassindale

Friday11th April 2025 7.30 pm in the BRLSI, Bath, and on Zoom

The image is the flea from Micrographia by Robert Hooke

Robert Hooke FRS, 1635-1703, was the first professional scientist and he played a key role in developing contemporary experimental science. He was an outstanding scientist, engineer, astronomer (laying foundations for William Hershel), architect, artist, microscopist, and a pioneer in many other fields. He was not simply an observer; he always sought to explain his observations and experiments and frequently developed new theories. The most familiar aspects of his legacy today are: Micrographia, his groundbreaking book on the microscopic world, with his wonderful illustrations, including the flea; the Monument, a giant zenith telescope and a memorial to the great fire of London; and Hooke’s law of elasticity, now taught in Key Stage 3 physics.

His observations and theories about fossils paved the way for the work Charles Moore, whose fossil collection is in the care of BRLSI.

Alan Bassindale will suggest that Hooke’s childhood on the Isle of Wight helps us to explain his extensive range of lifelong interests. He will illuminate Hooke’s achievements as a scientist using both Micrographia and his astronomical discoveries. Alan will discuss Hooke’s various feuds, with Newton and others, that may have contributed to his relative obscurity.

Alan Bassindale is an Emeritus Professor of Chemistry and former Pro-Vice-Chancellor of The Open University. He has a longstanding interest in the history of science.

A video recording of this lecture is available here.

Friday 14th March 2025 How Sunlight Drives Metabolism and Delays Ageing

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The William Herschel Lecture

Dr Robert Fosbury

Friday 14th March 2025 7.30 pm in the BRLSI, Bath, and on Zoom

Life on planet Earth has evolved for billions of years in the presence of light from the Sun. Over recent decades, radical changes have taken place in the lighting of the built environment which have, for the first time in evolutionary history, removed the non-visible regions of the spectrum present in natural daylight. This absence, driven by the quest for the energy efficiency of lighting, is resulting in the disruption of human metabolism that may have health costs that far exceed the modest reductions of energy use for lighting that may have been achieved. In this talk, I discuss the way in which near-infrared light penetrates deep into living tissue where it allows the body’s metabolic systems to work at the level they have evolved to achieve.

A video recording of this lecture is available here.

Friday 6th December 2024 New Results from Gaia

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Crystallising white dwarfs, spinning minor planets, and our Galaxy’s dark matter halo

Professor Michael Perryman

The image shows the integration of the M1 primary mirror on the torus of the Gaia spacecraft © EADS Astrium SAS, France


Science populariser Ethan Siegel has described the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission as “One of the most remarkable space science missions that most people have never heard of”. It is 10 years into its pioneering objective of mapping out the three-dimensional positions and motions of two billion stars in our Galaxy and beyond. This is providing great advances in understanding the way that stars are born and evolve, and yielding remarkable insights into the structure and evolution of our own Galaxy.

I will look at just three examples of how astronomers are using these data: to peer inside white dwarfs and understand how they are cooling over billions of years, to examine how solar radiation pressure is re-arranging the orbits and rotation of thousands of minor planets in our Solar System, and to look at the fossil records of cannibalised galaxies in our Galaxy’s outer halo to see how our own Milky Way galaxy came into existence.


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.

A video recording is available here.

Thursday 21st November 2024 An Astronomical Adventure Story

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From the Discovery of Uranus to the Astronomical Observatories of Ireland

Professor Michael Burton, Director of the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium

The image is a sketch of M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, by William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse in 1845.

William Herschel’s discovery of Uranus in 1781– the first new planet found by humanity since antiquity – made him famous overnight.  It also profoundly changed our conception of the cosmos and stirred the imagination, a driver for the Enlightenment and the emergence of modern science.

The consequences were many, one of which was the founding of an observatory in Armagh, now the longest running observatory in the British Isles that has been continuously used for its original purpose – of exploring the cosmos.

Richard Robinson, Archbishop of Armagh and the Primate of All-Ireland, knew Herschel from the time he spent in Bath in the years following the discovery of Uranus. He was inspired to found Armagh Observatory in 1790 by it.  A century later the famous “New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars” (the NGC) was compiled in Armagh by its then Director, John Dreyer. The NGC is the successor to John Herschel’s General Catalogue, made using the Grubb 10” telescope in Armagh that still works today. 

In Birr Castle, in County Offaly in Ireland, the 3rd Earl of Ross, William Parsons, was motivated by Herschel’s “40 foot” telescope to build his Great Telescope in 1845, with its 6-foot speculum mirror – the Leviathan – so succeeding Herschel’s 40 foot as the world’s largest telescope. Using it, and working with the Director of Armagh Romney Robinson, he uncovered the enigma of the spiral nebula, what we recognise today as other galaxies situated far beyond our own Milky Way,

Today the historic observatories of Ireland – Armagh, Birr and Dunsink (Dublin) – whose astronomers have worked closely together from their foundations – have come together as the Astronomical Observatories of Irelands with the aspiration to seek UNESCO World Heritage accreditation for their outstanding astronomical heritage, still very evident at the three sites today.

Each observatory also has ambitious plans for their sites. All are still active in scientific research and education in addition to their heritage, serving as beacons for the public communication of science in our challenged 21st century world, where many of the pressing problems faced by humanity must be tackled through the application of science.

As we approach the 250th anniversary of Herschel’s epoch-making discovery of Uranus in Bath – which will occur on the 13th of March in 2031 – it is timely to ask how might we mark this discovery and celebrate the achievements of all the Herschels in their pursuit of frontline science?

Professor Michael Burton is the Director of the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium as well as the President of the International Astronomical Union’s Commission C4 on “World Heritage and Astronomy”.

His own career in astronomy has followed in some of Herschel’s pioneering footsteps.  It began in Edinburgh studying cosmic sources of infrared radiation (as first discovered by Herschel) using one of the first telescopes specially built for the infrared – the UKIRT in Hawaii.

Over the past decade he has been studying the structure of our Milky Way Galaxy – of which Herschel drew the first map – using radio telescopes in Australia in order to map out the giant clouds of molecules where stars are forming.

Today he runs both the Observatory and Planetarium in Armagh, where research & discovery, education & outreach, history & heritage all come together and contribute to a sense of place and civic pride in the community.

A link to a video recording of the lecture is available here.