Bradford Astronomical Society's Annual

Roll up, Roll up for this years spectacular event held on saturday 17th january. This year saw quite a number of visitors of all ages throughout the day, although this year we saw fewer telescopes from the general public, most were brought in by our own members for adjustments or advice on set up etc.

A Big thank you to all our members who came to give assistance on the day, and to all those who brought in telescopes and equipment which added to our displays etc.

Below are a selection of photographs of the day, kindly supplied by maggie preece (photographer extrodinaire) maggie and her husband alan put on wonderful display of binoculars, and maggie succeeded in persauding all the visitors that they should start off with a decent pair of binoculars before spending a fortune on a telescope - sound advice indeed except we have heard that a hit squad from meade are now looking for her..........

THING OF PURPOSE

There are several ways of finding your way around the night sky but one of the best ways is to have a knowledgeable friend who is armed with a green laser beam pointing at a dark recess of the night sky. This erudite hero would recite sound bites of useful information about a distant fuzzy blob or a diamante broach look-alike; their comments would be duly greeted by my choruses of "Oooh's and Ahhh's", albeit slightly muffled as my face would be crushed against the eyepieces of binoculars or telescope as I follow the laser-green road like Dorothy on her yellow brick travels.

But alas, it's difficult to produce such a friend at the drop of a hat; and so I resort to grasping my binoculars and running out into the garden and hastily point them towards a three inch gap between the clouds - praying that I'll manage to spot something vaguely interesting before the clouds roll in again. Hey-ho. Now I must tell you at this point that Father Christmas brought me a new pair of binoculars (sorry, apparently they are not a "pair of binoculars" - but "a binocular", singular, not plural, as in "a bicycle", but for fear of being called weird we will still refer to them as a "pair of bins".

Anyway, I digress - to get back to finding our way around the night sky... They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and so I invented a gadget to help me seek out my targets. When I go stargazing I start by a desire to look at a specific object - for example, M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. I'm hopeless at star hopping and often spend three or four minutes seeking Andromeda, by which time I am frustrated, distracted, and ready for a sandwich. I needed something that would point me in the right direction so that I could start my observing straight away before my enemy encircled me (clouds)! I wondered if a sextant might help and did some research on the internet. These proved to be fairly expensive and I wasn't sure if a sextant would do the job anyway.

My next idea was to buy a quadrant, but again my research left me wondering if a quadrant would help. I found a site which gave instructions for a home-made quadrant (http://www.nmm.ac.uk/make-your-own/quadrant). The instructions were easy to follow and I soon made a paper version - just to see how it worked. Quadrants are great if you want to work out where you are in the world - but I wanted to know where things were in the heavens. So, armed with a good husband who owns a reasonable saw a commands a great deal of patience, we created a "thing of purpose".

Here is how it works - we consider two or three things we want to study in the night sky and use a computer program or internet to work out where these objects will be at certain times. Then we take to the garden armed with binoculars, tripods, and the "thing of purpose". The base is a large compass rose and we align this with the attached compass. Then we place the "standy-uppy bit" (this is a technical noun that was created to fox the academics) on top of the base and place it carefully along the azimuth coordinate we had established earlier. The "pointer" in the "standy-uppy bit" is a green laser pointer and this is swizzled around to align along the altitude coordinate until the green laser beam is pointing at, what we hope, is M31. The trick then is to follow the beam with binoculars and, hey presto!

At the moment this model is a working prototype which friends at the BAS suggest should be either patented or used to light the barbecue. So you never know - keep watching "The Dragon's Den" you might see us there asking for a couple of million for 2% of our business, or on the other hand - see you at the barbecue

Maggie and Alan Preece's home made star pointer - read the description of it's conception below in Maggie's inimitable style!