The Flamsteed audience was delighted to welcome back Stuart Clark after an absence of only one year.  Stuart’s writing career has been unfolding (as has his music career we understand!) and most recently he was pleased to be appointed Senior Editor for Space Science at ESA, the European Space Agency. Stuart returned to talk about gravity — Since 1687 […]

Flamsteed members were delighted by an unscheduled visit from Dr Chris Lintott of BBC’s Sky at Night.  Chris was able to come along to the March 1st meeting to present an introduction to the Solar Stormwatch project which has been developed working with the Royal Observatory Greenwich. Following in the footsteps of Galaxy Zoo, Solar Stormwatch aims to use the power […]

Rebekah Higgitt began the evening with a talk entitled “Solar Observation at the Royal Observatory Greenwich”.  Rebekah is NMM Curator of The History of Science and Technology. Rebekah opened with a brief description of the ‘Solar Story’ exhibition at the ROG. The exhibition ranges from the very earliest historical observations of the Sun, through work carried out […]

Greg has been delivering this super presentation for a couple of years now, including his appearance at AstroFest in 2009.  His engagement at the Flamsteed, one of his local societies, was long overdue. Some members had braced themselves for a challenging bout of string theory — “Three dimensions?  I thought you needed 22!” — so […]

I never tire of hearing the evergreen Christmas story about the Star of Bethlehem and listening to the astronomers’ analysis of what it could have been! David Hughes is a super speaker and entertainer.  His style is clear and witty, and he crams in tons of detail.   Now retired, David was for many years Professor […]

A complicated set of circumstances … prevented our scheduled speaker from coming to Greenwich and so Mike stepped into the breach (ta-ra!). October 2009 was the 125th anniversary of the recognition of Greenwich as prime meridian of the world, zero degrees longitude, by an international conference held in Washington DC.  Mike’s talk explained how this […]

Robert Massey kicked-off the Flamsteed’s 10th birthday evening with an excellent presentation covering the full story of how we have got to know the Moon (so far). Robert was formerly Public Astronomer at the ROG and is now with the Royal Astronomical Society.  He was a founder of the Flamsteed and gave one of the […]

We were delighted that Dr Francisco Diego was able to be with us to deliver the first talk of the Flamsteed’s 2009/10 season at the start of our 10th birthday celebrations.   Francisco was the first-ever Flamsteed speaker 10 years ago, and effectively a founder-member of the Society. For his theme Francisco talked about the amazing […]

Marek spoke to us in our final lecture meeting of the season.  Over the Millennia man has had many different perceptions of the Earth, our home, but the space-age has revolutionised our view in two ways especially — first, Earth is an almost insignificant speck in the quiet backwaters of a seething Universe;  second, Earth […]

Richard Dunn began with a brief introduction to his new book “The Telescope: A short history” (NMM Publishing 2009).  The book is a very well presented publication and covers the development and social impact of all kinds of telescope, nautical and terrestrial as well as astronomical.  It is an entertaining and informative read. For the Flamsteed audience […]