For the first time ever, SIGMA was invited to the RAF Lossiemouth Friends and Families Day (22 July 2023). I’m pleased to report it was a very successful event for us.

We had an area within the hangar where we set up an array of different telescopes and binoculars with information sheets about them. We also had a projection display where Ray showed some of his wonderful images to the public.

The stall was busy all day long, well, apart from the half an hour we had to vacate the hangar owing to the fire alarm going off!

Many people took away our information sheets and many of them were interested in coming along to our meetings. I’m sure that from this we’re going to get quite a few new members joining SIGMA in the coming months.

The Lunt solar telescope proved to be very popular, and people were blown away with the views of the sun. And just for once the weather gods played nicely for us and we had sunshine all day long, in fact I think we were the only place in the country that had sunshine looking at the weather reports. Not just that, the sun was very active. Indeed I mentioned many times that I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much solar activity happening at one time. There were nine sunspots visible and there seemed to be prominences around the whole of the sun.

At times there was a queue of people waiting to look through the solar scope. The queue you see here in this picture though is not the one for the telescope, it’s the one for the burger van just out of shot. But that did not stop people coming out of the queue to have a quick look at our star while they waited to get their lunch.

I’m sure that we will be asked back again next year, and it will be a pleasure to go to promote the club and hopefully get some new members out of it.

Pete Sherman,
Chair