Welcome and Notices Ian Bradley EAS

Ian welcomed members, new members and made a presentation:

Presentation to Anna Hall

Ian made a presentation to our host Museum Curator of long service. Anna has opened up the premises, making tea, sitting through meetings to lock up after we leave for more than a decade until recently.

Anna Hall

Announcements

• A Skywatcher HEQ5 Pro mount and tripod are for sale – please express your interest through our EAS Contact Page.

Sky Notes for December 2019 – Moira Greenhalgh EAS

After sunset at around 7 pm the Moon, Saturn and Jupiter float in a line above the southern horizon. Moira guided us to the location of the 5.7 magnitude planet Uranus that is worth the effort even with low-powered equipment for its pure colour:

Uranus – NASA/JPL-Caltech

Moira drew our attention to The Square of Pegasus which still rides high in the sky in the evening before Orion becomes prominent in midwinter. In particular, the local galaxy Andromeda, the only galaxy visible to the average person’s unaided eye (See quiz, below).

See also our EAS Sky notes for December.

Quiz – set by David Glass and Richard Rae EAS

David organised use into teams of three and challenged the meeting to two sets of 20 questions. Contrary to the fear that David would challenge us with solutions to his latest research, there was a distinct orientation in favour of practical astronomy, previous EAS talks and what ought to be common knowledge.

So, what is the farthest object visible to the unaided eye? Before going through a list the thousands of visible stars (which are all in our own galaxy)- see Sky Notes above.

Social Evening

While David calculated the overall winners the second half of the meeting broke up into a social evening with fare kindly laid on by hardworking members and the museum curator.