The BAA Summer Meeting
9th & 10th September 2022
by Richard Oakley
Finally after years of planning and postponements the BAA Autumn meeting was staged at UHI Moray on the weekend of the 9 & 10 September 2022.
The lectures were spread over Friday evening and Saturday with a theme of the Solar System, it’s planets and the Sun.
The talks were supported by a UK wide in-person audience of approximately seventy, as well as being recorded for presentation on the BAA website for future reference.
A range of tours took place on Sunday keeping the remaining visitors entertained.
Photos from the event can be viewed on Flickr, with thanks to Richard, Pete, Sandra Brantingham and Ken Kennedy.
The Autumn Meeting commenced on the Friday evening with an excellent talk by John Mason of Sky at Night fame, on the demise of the dinosaurs, a link to this talk will be available on the BAA website in the near future. This was a fascinating presentation reviewing the potential different causes as why the dinosaurs became extinct be it through volcanic activity or meteor(s) impact.
Introduction and the award of the Walter Goodacre Medal to Lyn Smith
The event on the Saturday morning was introduced by BAA President with the awarding of the Walter Goodacre medal to Lyn Smith for her long service to the BAA as Solar Section Director and Solar research.
Non Professional Comet Observing and Discovery Today
Dennis Buczynski gave a well polished talk on his current work involving Comet tracking, the presentation was given with Denis’s entertaining style and practical astronomer bias
Our Red Sun
Lyn Smith’s talk discussed the observation of the Sun’s chromosphere using H alpha filters and was focused on her observing experience rather than from a Solar physicist perspective
Our Magnetic Sun and it’s Influence Across the Solar System
This talk was given by Prof. Clare Parnell of St Andrews University and discussed her research into the effects the Sun’s magnetic fields have on the Solar system close to and at the distance from source.
Pete Sherman & Tim Schroder – SIGMA, Moray’s Astronomy Club
Pete and Tim made superb use of the after lunch slot to introduce the audience to SIGMA, explaining how the name had been selected, the club’s history and how it has developed and plans to evolve over the coming years.
Sandra Brantingham – Aurora
Sandra’s talk on Auroras was an excellent presentation with simple slides that supported her presentation, the talk was well structured and presented,
Venus 2022-2023
The penultimate presentation was by Paul Abel again of Sky at Night fame, this was a great talk on our sister planet.
Paul has offered to give a talk to SIGMA so we all look forward to that.
Monitoring the night sky with video cameras
The final talk was by Nick James and focused on the installation of a range of all sky cameras at his Chelmsford property.
Nick pointed out that the cameras were relatively cheap, had produced some really interesting recordings – including a fuel burn by a Russian rocket. Nick also pointed out that there were no cameras of this type in Scotland linked to the network. Presumably Eric’s all sky camera is not linked to this system.
Support
The event was a great success and the BAA were extremely happy with the help given by SIGMA so a huge thanks to anybody involved in the event logistics. Particular thanks goes to Malcolm Bradley for spending his entire Sunday helping to run visitors to Glen Grant and Speyside, the guests were particularly grateful for this. We would also like to thank our sister clubs for supporting this event – all local clubs were present. The support given will greatly influence any future BAA decision to bring events north.