2025 Programme

Meetings are held on the first Friday of each month (unless otherwise specified) at Alves Village Hall. The Centre is ideal for routine observing either during or after meetings, with only minimal light pollution.

Doors open at 7pm for a 7.30pm start.

Non-members are always welcome – please contact us.

Friday 10th January 2025	Equipment Night Come along to see what equipment club members have, or ask questions about your own equipment
Friday 7 February 2025 Dr Ray Palmer SIGMA	Light – The Eternal Messenger of The Stars – An Overview of Stellar Spectroscopy Despite the enormous distances and time it takes for light to travel to the earth from the stars and other celestial objects, light carries a plethora of information concerning the objects they originate from. In this talk, the history and application of the techniques of Spectroscopy employed to decipher this information will be discussed, as will recent discoveries which appear to undermine our understanding of the universe.
Friday 7 March 2025 Rich Oakley SIGMA	The Yorkshire Man, The Astronomer and the King. This presentation covers the various methods devised to help with Ship Navigation in the 18th Century.
Friday 4 April 2025 Ken Rice Royal Observatory Edinburgh	Detecting and characterising planets around other stars. We have now confirmed more than 5000 exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other than the Sun. These range from close-in Earth-sized planets, to super-Earths and sub-Neptunes, to ‘hot’ Jupiters orbiting very close to their parents stars, and to planets more massive than Jupiter on very wide orbits. There are numerous methods for detecting and characterising these planets and it is now possible to say something about their internal compositions and their atmospheres. However, the latter is still very challenging and we are only really able to characterise the atmospheres of quite massive planets that are almost certainly not habitable. In this talk Ken will discuss the various methods for detecting and characterising exoplanets, what we now know about the large number of exoplanets detected to date, and what we might expect to discover with the next generation of telescopes and instruments.
Friday 2 May 2025 Callum Potter British Astronomical Association (Deep Sky Section)	Beginning Deep Sky Observing – An Introduction Covering what is deep sky observing, what equipment do you need, what to look at, visual observing, basic imaging, electronically assisted astronomy and smart-telescopes.
Friday 6 June 2025	AGM / Solar Observing
Friday 4 July 2025 Jackie Eadie SIGMA	Moonstruck What significance do moons have for human science and culture? A look back over our evolving understanding of their existence, leading up to the exciting prospects offered by both current moon exploration and speculation for the future. From myths to missions and gyroscopes to geodes .
Friday 1 August 2025 Prof. Lyndsay Fletcher University of Glasgow	Exploring the Solar Atmosphere: A Journey through the Sun’s Spectrum It is said that astronomy became astrophysics when the science of spectroscopy was first applied to the stars. Spectroscopy refers to the analysis of radiation when it is split up by wavelength; by doing this many properties of the material that is emitting or absorbing the radiation can be deduced. In the case of the Sun, the most familiar spectral features are the strong absorption lines called the Fraunhofer lines, discovered in the early 19th century and identified some years later as belonging to particular chemical elements. This gives rise to the idea of the ‘chemical fingerprint’ that can be used also to identify the composition of distant stars. However, spectroscopy can tell us much more. With spectroscopy we can work out speed, temperature, density and other properties of the solar material. Several powerful telescopes, on the ground and in space, are carrying out spectroscopy of the solar atmosphere from its visible surface to its far outer layers. In this talk I will introduce some of the science of spectroscopy in its application to the Sun, discuss some recent and forthcoming telescopes and satellites for spectroscopy, and describe some of what we have learned from these about the astrophysics of the Sun.
Friday 5 September 2025 Holly Andrews	TBC
Friday 3 October 2025 The Sixth George Fraser Memorial Lecture In 2015 SIGMA, in association with Morayvia, held its first memorial lecture in honour of Prof. George Fraser (22 July 1955 – 18 March 2014). Born and brought up in Burghead, George was Professor of Detector Physics and Director of the Space Research Centre of the University of Leicester. Though his work was recognised internationally, his achievements are virtually unknown locally.
Prof. Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell Astrophysics, Department of Physics \| University of Oxford	‘Bursts, bangs and things that go bump in the night’ With improvements in telescopes and detectors astronomers no longer have to use long exposures (or long integration times). We are now seeing short-duration events, and variability on short time scales, in many branches of astronomy. This talk will describe some of the more amazing or surprising things we are finding.
Friday 7 November 2025 Alexander Mackinnon University of Glasgow	Touching the Sun: Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe A look at the science of the solar wind and the Sun’s outer atmosphere and at the discoveries being made by the two spacecraft currently exploring the innermost solar system, closer to the Sun than ever before.
Friday 5 December 2025	Christmas Quiz Bring along the family for a night of fun, questions and mince pies to end the year. There will also be the usual Christmas raffle.