The latest news from Sunderland Astronomical Society
September is the start of our new season. SAS Memberships will be due from 1st September 2025 (payable throughout September) for this season 2025/2026 Joining/Renewing helps support your local astronomical society & community. So come on down to the Cygnus Observatory (based at the Washington Wetlands Centre) to join or renew your SAS membership. The SAS is the largest…
To kick of our 2025-2026 Astronomy Society season of talks with a bang, you are in for a real treat. As part of 3 parts of a 6 part Series in Exploring the Solar System we welcome a good friend to SAS Dr Steve Barrett. In these 3 short talks Dr Steve Barrett (Liverpool University)…
This year’s Starbeque will be held at our usual venue, the Millshields car Derwent Reservoir on Saturday 27th September 2025. We meet around 3pm for our picnic / barbeque and continue into the night for stargazing. If the weather forecast is for cloud or rain will not stop the event going ahead, but we…
Something a bit different for the July lecture night. In recent years “Smart Telescopes” have arrived on the astronomy scene. Smart telescopes offer an automated way of doing astronomy and astrophotography, albeit at a quite expensive price. If you have a Seestar S50, or are are thinking of getting one, or would like to know…
Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE) is a mission that will revolutionise our understanding of the solar-terrestrial relationship, including the dynamic processes that control phenomena such as the aurora borealis (Norther/Southern Lights). In this fascinating talk Dr Jennifer Carter (Leicester University) will explain how the mission was born from a problem for X-ray astronomers,…
Although it took only three minutes to make our Universe (see ‘Beginning of Everything’) it will take more than a trillion trillion years for it to come to an end. In this talk Dr Steve Barrett (Liverpool University) will talk about this talk looks at what will happen to the Earth, the Sun, our the…
As larger telescopes get, as more light they gather. This together with the wish for higher spatial resolution gives rise to the development of telescopes of larger size. However, while the light gathering power increase works very well, due to the perturbations of our atmosphere the larger telescopes not necessarily deliver images of higher resolution,…
We know surprisingly little about the nature of the stage upon which the universe’s great show plays out. In this talk Graham Darke will take us through the ages, along the way examining humanity’s developing understanding of what space is. It will bring us right up to the modern era where what we know today…
What are galaxies, how are they classified, how are they formed: What do we understand about their lives, and their influence and how many pretty pictures can Julian can fit in one talk.
In this talk Dr Steve Barrett will talk about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) nearly 3 years after the launch of the JWST on Christmas Day 2021, this shorter talk reviews some of the images and spectra released to date.