Convention 1998S

The FAS 1998 Spring Convention and AGM took place at St Bartholomew’s School, Newbury on Saturday 9th May. Newbury Astronomical Society hosted the meeting, organised the venue, refreshments, etc. A small, but enthusiastic audience were treated to a range of excellent talks from the speakers, and were able to purchase items from the various trade stands present. Newbury AS provided some interesting exhibits and demonstrations. Here is a selection of photographstaken during the Convention.

The lecture program was kicked off by one of Newbury’s own members, George Sallit, who spoke about “Asteroids, Galaxies and CCD’s”. George provided some background information on how CCDs work, before explaining the techniques he uses to obtain the fine images he showed us.

Following the AGM, Anthony Cross and Kevin Kilburn from Manchester AS spoke about the “Uranographia Britannica”. This is a (very!) limited edition star chart drawn by John Bevis, which they had recently rediscovered in the Society’s library. They had brought the star atlas itself down to the meeting for attendees to look at. Michael Oates has digitized the star atlas and CD-ROMs were available for purchase at the meeting. Visit the Manchester AS Web site for further information about obtaining a copy of the atlas.

Professor Ian Halliday had recently become head of the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), and provided an interesting talk explaining the pressures he is under to satisfy all those who apply to the Council for a share of the very limited funding available.

Katherine Blundell from the Department of Astrophysics, Oxford University, spoke about “Radio Jets” and how radio astronomers use arrays such as MERLIN to make their observations. The last talk of the day was given by Jim Emerson of Queen Mary and Westfield College, whose subject was “Star Formation”.

Can you come up with some suitable captions for these photographs?

All photographs by Hayley Spence….