Category : Cambridge Astronomy Association

Hot Results on Cool Galaxies by Robert Kennicutt

Posted on: April 18, 2009 /
Categories: Cambridge Astronomy Association

Last night was the 50th anniversary meeting of the CAA in Cambridge and as well as the Mayor of Cambridge attending we also had Professor Robert Kennicutt as our guest speaker. His talk was entitled “Hot Results on Cool Galaxies: The Hidden Universe Revealed.” Robert Kennicutt is the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy

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The History of Spaceflight by David Bryant

Posted on: January 4, 2009 /
Categories: Cambridge Astronomy Association

On December 19th I attended the Cambridge Astronomy Association Christmas talk, which was entitled The History of Spaceflight by David Bryant. The CAA also laid on Christmas cake to have with our teas and coffees and we also had an annual competition/quiz where we had to guess what 15 strange objects were used for. I found these difficult to

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“Colouring the Night Sky” Talk by Alan Aylward

Posted on: October 18, 2008 /
Categories: Cambridge Astronomy Association

Tonight’s talk at the Cambridge Astronomy Assocation was by Alan Aylward who was telling us everything we needed to know about aurorae. Aurora can actually be seen from space, and some images demonstrated this, with views from the NASA shuttle. Aurora were actually treated with fear in historical times. Early research showed that aurorae actually

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Impact Day 2008

Posted on: October 13, 2008 /
Categories: Cambridge Astronomy Association

On Sunday I visited the Cambridge Astronomy Association for the Impact Day 2008, which was a free day of lectures about comets and meteorites. As well as a full day of lectures there were also a number of stalls selling astronomy books, astronomy hardware and of course a number of meteorites. I was amazed to see

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The Magnetic Sun

Posted on: August 16, 2008 /
Categories: Cambridge Astronomy Association

“The Magnetic Sun.” Dr Alice Courvoisier was the title of the August 2008 Cambridge Astronomy Association talk.  A diagram of the sun explained each named part of the Sun including the photosphere, chromosphere, filament, convective zone, radiative zone and prominence. It was also explained to us that the solar material in the Sun is a

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Stars Dancing with Black Holes

Posted on: July 19, 2008 /
Categories: Cambridge Astronomy Association

Stars Dancing with Black Holes was the title of Marc Freitag’s talk at this months meeting of the Cambridge Astronomy Association. Marc began by explaining what actually is defined as a black hole; known to have a most extreme case of gravitation, where the mass is concentrated in one point and it is surrounded by

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Introduction to Astronomy – Week 6

Posted on: May 31, 2008 /
Categories: Cambridge Astronomy Association

This was the final Wednesday night on the Introduction to Astronomy course and a bit of a shame it was all over. This week we had a talk by Roderick Willstrop entitled “History of the Telescope”. Roderick took us through 400 years of the main developments of Telescopes and the major telescopes that have been

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Introduction to Astronomy – Week 5

Posted on: May 26, 2008 /
Categories: Cambridge Astronomy Association

This week we had a talk by Lindsay King entitled “Galaxies – The Universes Building Blocks”. This week Lindsay went beyond the local group of galaxies and looked at different types of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. She then also looked back in time to the youngest galaxies at the limits of observation and showed

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