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fEBRUARY 2008

iMPACT cRATERS - TALK BY eMILY bALDWIN

Written by John Axtell - 11 February 2008

Guildford Astronomical Society meets once a month at The Guildford Institute in the middle of (as you might guess) Guildford. The meeting held on February 7 was a bit different in several ways. The main speaker was Emily Baldwin. Emily will already be familiar to Astronomy Now readers as one of its contributing writers. She will also be well know to members of the Society for Popular Astronomy, where she runs the Young Stargazers sections, and rejoices in the title of Chief Stargazer. The mention of young astronomers is particularly pertinent, which we will return to shortly.

Emily's title was Impact Craters and this is the subject of her recently completed thesis for her PhD at University College London. There were 60 GAS members present and Emily started by explaining of the basics of crater formation, both on dry land and also oceanic floor. We saw the distribution of the 170 or so known meteor craters on the Earth, but also looked at some of the crater formation on the Moon and elsewhere in the Solar System. It was interesting to learn that this study did not just address craters formed by asteroids, but also by micrometeorites. The immediate application for this is damage to satellites and of course to spacesuits worn by astronauts in orbit.

Now back to the 'youngsters' angle. Emily's parents came as visitors to the meeting, and that in a way was the completion of a circle. John Baldwin, (Emily's Dad), told me that Emily's interest in astronomy began when some local astronomers took telescopes along to an observing event at Emily's school (South Farnham Middle School) when she was about 9 years old. Those local astronomers were from Guildford AS. That got her interested. She became hooked after John took her along to attend one or two meetings of GAS. How nice that this effort made all that time ago was rewarded by that spark of interest which in turn led to a professional astronomer coming back to deliver a talk.

Gavin's Presentation

Another feature of the evening was the award of an inscribed tankard to our previous president, Gavin Stacey FRAS, who stood down at the last AGM after many years of service.

A well-deserved recognition!

Well done Gavin and thank you.

 

 

 

 

William Herschel and the Rings of Uranus - talk by Dr. Stuart Eves

After the coffee break, we had an additional talk, a short one by Dr. Stuart Eves of Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL), based at the nearby University of Surrey. He showed us the evidence for and against the possibility that William Herschel did in fact observe the main ring of Uranus, the planet he had discovered in 1781.

Steve has actually researched to the level of reading Herschel's own manuscript notes. Herschel described the ring as having exactly the right orientation, the right colour, and fairly close to what we now believe would have been the angle presented by the ring to an Earth-bound observer at the dates of Herschel’s various observations between 1789 and 1892.

On the basis of the evidence presented, the GAS jury was prepared to give the benefit of the doubt and accept the likelihood that William Herschel had indeed observed Uranus’s Epsilon ring - a fascinating thought.

Outreach activities

GAS’s outreach activities have been referred to above.

In the week immediately after this meeting, there were no less than three such activities scheduled. Two were for Scouts (from Frimley and from Godalming) and the third was for the Science Club at the Royal Grammar School, Guildford.

Let’s hope that at some time in the future we have another such as Emily, a talk from a real astronomer whose fledgling interest was sparked by this kind of effort made by Society members. If your own Astro Society isn’t doing this kind of work as yet, then do endeavour to get out there and undertake this very rewarding work.