Challenger – 25 years later…

Hard to believe, I know, but twenty five years ago today the space shuttle Challenger was lost, with all her crew. Twenty five years… that’s a quarter of a century… Unbelievable… I’m sure many of you reading this will remember that awful, awful day. It was the Space Enthusiast community’s “Kennedy Moment”, we all remember [...]

Eddington AS “Moonwatch”, Brewery Arts Centre, Friday January 14th 2011

(All photos courtesy EAS founder, Philip Stobbart) Last night’s “MoonWatch” at Kendal’s Brewery Arts Centre was a *tremendous* success, with – we guesstimated – around 150 people coming together in the garden at the Brewery Arts Centre to enjoy spectacular views of the Moon through telescopes belonging to members of Kendal’s Eddington Astronomical Society. The [...]

Seven years on Mars… on Mars… on Mars…

Around this time seven years ago today I was doing a very good impression of a zombie, having stayed up all night to watch the heartstopping landing of the rover “Spirit” on Mars. I had followed the whole thing live, via NASA TV, on a small RealPlayer box that kept freezing and breaking-up into a shattered kaleidescope [...]

Partial solar eclipse from Kendal…

So, how did we get on watching the partial solar eclipse from Kendal? Um… not very well. It didn’t look good when my alarm went off at 6am and the next thing I heard was rain lashing against the window. That’s not a sound a would-be eclipse watcher wants to hear. But, ever the optimists, [...]

EAS event for the BBC’s “Stargazing LIVE” series

Like many astronomical societies across the country, Kendal’s Eddington AS organised an event to support the BBC’s “Stargazing LIVE” programmes, which are on BBC2 this week. Our event was a “Skywatch”, held in Abbot Hall Park last night, at which we planned… hoped… to show members of the public Jupiter and Uranus plus many other [...]

How to view tomorrow morning’s partial solar eclipse…

Stargazers and skywatchers across the UK have their fingers, toes and everything else crossed today, hoping for clear skies tomorrow morning, to allow us to watch a partial eclipse of the Sun! These are pretty exciting at any time – the Moon moves across the Sun’s face, blocking part of it from our view and [...]

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow. Crunchy numbers The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 210,000 times in 2010. If it were an exhibit at [...]