Telescope

 The Red Cross shop has had a space themed window for a while now - Star Wars jigsaws, books on astronomy and, as a focal point, a large telescope on a tripod.

Now that it's so easy for me to just step  outside my kitchen door and look up at the night sky, from a very dark garden, I've been getting into astronomy more.  So finally, I decided to take the plunge.

Even in the charity shop, it cost £80, but I looked it up online, and it's supposed to be a perfect telescope for a beginner.

Now all I need is a clear night!

 

Events at the Festival

 I'm sorry to have missed Dame Judi Dench reciting Shakespeare, or Miriam Margolyes, or so many other events over the last week (not to mention the Alt Hay events in the Parish Hall - I just didn't have the energy to go out in the evenings!)

But I did manage to see two very good events.  The first was Maggie Aderin-Pocock talking about her new book about looking at constellations, with a bit about her work around the world at big telescopes, and a bit about her childhood running up to the top of her block of flats to look at the moon.  I loved the way she described watching the Clangers as being a 'gateway drug' to Star Trek - and now she's appeared, in puppet form, in the modern re-make of the Clangers, and she got to visit the set and hold the soup dragon in her hands!

The other event was Robin Wall Kimmerer, talking about her book Braiding Sweetgrass, her new book Gathering Moss, and her upcoming book Service Berry.  She was in conversation with James Rebanks - and now I'll have to look out for his books, too.  He has a sheep farm where he practices regenerative agriculture - they talked a bit about listening to the plants on the land, and the plants will tell you what they need to thrive. 

One of the examples was a field of grass that was being overgrown with thistles.  Normal farming practice is to poison the thistles, or cut them, but they only grow in large numbers where the grass has been nibbled down to nothing and has a weak root system - encourage the grass (stop over grazing) and encourage biodiversity with wild flowers and different grass species, and the thistles won't get such a hold on the field to begin with.

If they wanted to send the audience away with one thought - and it was a sold out event in the Global Stage, which is one of the biggest stages - it was probably "Photosynthesis is the answer".  It may be a boring thing that you learn at school and then forget about, but it is vital to life on Earth.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is an enrolled member of the Potawatomi tribe, and she talked about their Creation myth, in which Skywoman falls to Earth, which was covered with water, where the animals that lived in the water brought earth up for her to live on, and she scattered the seeds of all the good plants from the branch of the tree that she had brought down with her.  It's a story about gift giving and love, in contrast to the story of Adam and Eve where humans have dominion over the animals.  She said that we, as a species, need to get back to that mind set of love and reciprocity with the natural world.  One of her examples was the traditional indigenous Three Sisters planting scheme, where corn provides something for the bean plant to grow up, and squash leaves cover the ground and keep the roots moist - this way of planting provides more food than three separate monocultures.

Modern industrial farming breaks up the process of growing into separate bits, when it would be better if the different processes were integrated - and there are no consequences to the separate actions, which leads to problems further down the line.

There were a couple of interesting questions at the end, too.  One was about the Welsh government policy of putting aside 10% of farmland for nature - James answered this one, by saying that some parts of farms are uneconomic in the current climate, and it is possible to do this with those parts of the farm that are losing money, but he said we also have to look at the bigger picture, where supermarkets have enormous power, and that we need better regulation and a fairer pricing structure to benefit the farmers who are struggling.

Another questioner asked if it wasn't a good thing for there to be more CO2 in the atmosphere, because didn't it make plants grow faster and be greener?  Robin said that CO2 is not the only thing to consider - plants also need nitrogen and phosphorus and other elements, and those things have to be in balance.  CO2 is pumped into some commercial greenhouses to make the plants grow quicker, but this is not necessarily a good thing.

Another thought for the audience to take away with them was how to do practical things to save the planet.  "Sometimes you've got to make a ruckus," Robin said - and sometimes you have to burn something down to get something better in its place.  Also, she said that we are all given a gift, and it's up to us to find out the best way to use that - whether it's picking out what we can do from one of those books with a title like "100 Ways to Save the Planet" or something else - find what you love, and do that.

Magical Moment

 When I went to the Castle the other evening, I had a very clear view of Jupiter and Venus in the sky from the Castle lawn - they were the brightest objects in the sky.

When I came out again, over an hour later, the stars had turned above the Earth, and Orion was just over the car park, with Sirius the Dog Star at his heels to the left, and Taurus the Bull to his right (a prominent V of stars) - and behind Taurus the misty cloud of the Pleiades.  It was beautifully clear.

Stars in their Eyes

There were three really interesting things that I could have gone to see last night - the Walking Festival talks at the Swan, a folk singer at the Globe, and a talk about medieval astronomy at Cusop Church.
I chose the medieval astronomy, because I went to the talk that the speaker, Martin Griffiths, did last year, and thought it was absolutely fascinating.
This time the church wasn't quite so full, but the weather had been pretty awful, which may have dissuaded people from going out.
The talk centred around the state of knowledge in the medieval period in Europe, where a lot of the knowledge of the Classical World had been lost - or rather, it had moved East, to the Islamic world, Vedic India and China, where they encouraged the love of knowledge for its own sake. In the Medieval Christian West, theology was the Queen of Sciences and anything else wasn't seen as important.
The situation was complicated, though, because on the one hand the Church was limiting knowledge to what was acceptable, and what fitted with the Bible (even if it was contradicted by actual experience), and on the other hand the Church had saved knowledge from the Classical world such as Plato and Aristotle (who was a "rubbish scientist", but whose works were copied for 1500 years).
Astronomy was important to the Church because of the difficulties of calculating the correct date for Easter every year, so that was studied - with the proviso that the Earth was, naturally, in the centre, with the planets, Moon and sun going round it.
Astrology was also important, and to cast an individual's horoscope you need to know the positions of the planets. Astrology also had a correspondence between an astrological sign and each part of the body. Chest problems which we would now call lung cancer were common in the smoky atmospheres of medieval housing, with all those open fires, and the chest was ruled by Cancer the Crab - which is where the name for the disease came from.
Another difficulty for medieval scholars was trying to do maths with Roman numerals. At this point Martin Griffiths looked around the church to find some numbers to point at with his laser pointer - Arabic numerals, except they're not really Arabic either. They originally came from Vedic India. When they had numerals which were easy to use, and one of the Popes had re-invented the abacus, they were able to do all sorts of maths problems which had been incredibly difficult before.
And then an Arab invented algebra, which made even more complex maths possible.
At around the same time, someone went down to Cordova in Islamic Spain and translated 87 books into Latin - which caused a great expansion in universities across Europe, as scholars came to grips with this flood of new knowledge. At the time, one of the biggest libraries in Europe, near Rouen, had a grand total of 39 books. Cordova had a library of half a million books.
Later in the talk, Martin Griffiths said something quite staggering while talking about Leonardo da Vinci - when Leonardo was born, it is estimated that there were only 7,500 books in the whole of Europe. During his lifetime, the printing press was invented (or rather, pinched from the Chinese, along with paper which made printing much cheaper) and when Leonardo died there were 30 million books in Europe. The Church wasn't going to be able to keep control of that outpouring of knowledge.
Back to cosmology, and Dante's Divine Comedy, which has 9 circles of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. This was based on the Aristotelian system, and is also where the phrase "on cloud nine" comes from - the highest circle of Heaven!
So it was a fascinating evening, with a lot of questions at the end. Even better, I won a prize in the raffle (some Roses chocolates) and got a lift home!

Stars in their Eyes - Astronomy Talk

While walkers are headed out to the hills over the weekend beginning on 10th October, I'll be hiking up the hill to Cusop Church on Friday 11th for a talk about medieval astronomy.
Martin Griffiths has been to the church before - then he was speaking about astronomy with reference to the Welsh myths, and he was absolutely fascinating. This time he'll be talking about art and objects from the medieval period that illustrate what they knew of the night sky.
He was a senior lecturer in astronomy at the University of South Wales, and has also worked for NASA. He's also involved in the Dark Sky Wales project.
Tickets are £6 (£4 for students), and the talk starts at 7.30pm.

Happy St David's Day

The Northern Lights over Brecon Beacons by Alyn Wallace.

A Talk from the Moon Lady

I always try to get to see something at the Winter Festival, and my choice this year was Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who was talking about the Moon.
I hadn't been to the Festival tent before - I thought it was just an auditorium, but there was a whole mini Festival space in the first tent, with the auditorium behind it. There was a bar, coffee bar (with recycleable cups), art exhibition with pictures of horses, wild wreaths made locally, and a book shelf and signing table, with space for a signing queue, at the far end.

The speaker probably should have been in bed - she was still wearing a hospital wristband from earlier in the week - but she gave an enthusiastic and fascinating talk, interspersed with TV clips so she didn't have to talk all the time. She was wearing a rather wonderful dark blue dress, with a pattern of the faces of the moon on it.
She's a co-presenter of The Sky at Night, so it's no surprise that one of her astronomer heroes is Sir Patrick Moore, whose maps of the surface of the moon were so good they were used by the Russians during the Space Race.
She spoke of the moon as a family heirloom, lighting her father's way home from school on his bike across the plains of Africa, and fascinating her as a child through the street lights and cloudy skies of London - and it's a love of the moon she is trying to pass on to her own daughter, who is now eight years old and was sitting in the audience with her dad.
She talked about the importance of the moon to the earth, deflecting meteor strikes, controlling the tides and possibly even causing the creation of RNA (the ancestor of DNA) in tidal rock pools, thus creating life, and all of us. There was a clip of her in a helicopter in Arizona, circling a crater, and another of her in a boat going through a rip tide in Scotland, from a documentary she made about eight years ago. She got the email about the documentary about two days after her daughter was born, and her husband had to go along on location to look after the baby (by then about four months old).
There was another film clip of her explaining how eclipses worked to Jeremy Paxman, and actually getting him to sound quite impressed. On stage, she demonstrated the tidally locked moon with a plushy toy that she waved around, its face always towards her.
She also talked about the history of observations of the moon, from the earliest observatory discovered recently in Scotland, formed of pits that corresponded with the phases of the moon as observed from that cliff top, 10,000 years ago.
Then there was En-hedu-ana, Astronomer Priestess of the Moon Goddess in Ur about 4,000 years ago. Hers is the first female name recorded in history, and she is also the first poet known by name - she wrote poems about the moon, of course, and also ran the temple. Maggie Aderin-Pocock said that she was aiming for a similar official title, but Astronomer Priestess of the Moon Goddess of Guildford didn't quite have the same ring to it!
When she was asked to write the Sky at Night guide to the Moon, her first reaction was terror. Although she's a serious scientist as well as TV presenter, she's dyslexic, so writing a book was a difficult task for her.
I bought the book, of course.

Astronomy and Art, Welsh Myths and Legends

Cusop Church was packed for the talk, by Martin Griffiths. He's one of the astronomers behind Dark Skies Wales, former senior lecturer in Astronomy at the University of South Wales, and he was a founder member of the NASA Astrobiology Science Communication Team.
And here he was, in a small church near Hay.
The talk took us through 30,000 years of art associated with astronomy, starting with a cave painting from Lascaux of a bull. The reason this particular bull is associated with astronomy is that six dots were added to the picture just behind the bull's shoulder, exactly where the Pleiades is found - and six stars of that cluster are visible with the naked eye. So the bull is the constellation of Taurus, and here is proof that this group of stars has been known as the Bull from the beginning of human history.
There were lots of slides with the talk - but he was standing just a bit too far from the projector (propped up on a pile of hymn books on a table in the aisle) so he had to keep leaping forward and waving the remote around.
We moved through the Egyptian Book of the Dead (where the sky goddess Nut was supposed to swallow the planets as they disappeared, until they appeared again when they passed through her birth canal!), Greek myth - the Milky Way was supposed to be the breast milk of the goddess Hera, which spurted out when she was trying to feed baby Hercules - and the Welsh myth was the story of Ceridwen, the moon goddess, who wanted to make a potion to make her ugly son beautiful.
Unfortunately, the recipe said that the cauldron had to be stirred for a year, so she hired a boy, Gwion, to stir it for her and, right at the last minute, he knocked the cauldron over by mistake, tried to stop the last of the potion from pouring away, burned his hand so put it in his mouth - and drank the potion. Because it wasn't quite ready, it didn't make him beautiful, but it did allow him to change shape to attempt to escape the furious Ceridwen - until he changed himself into a grain of wheat, and Ceridwen became a hen, and ate him. Then Ceridwen became pregnant, and nine months later produced a baby boy named Taliesin, Shining Brow, who became one of the greatest Welsh bards.
Moving on to the Renaissance, Martin Griffiths talked about Galileo, and how he examined the moon through a telescope, and discovered the four moons of Jupiter - and even worked out the heights of the mountains on the moon from the lengths of the shadows they cast. And then he told a funny story about the first Welsh astronomers to use a telescope to look at the moon, which they borrowed from a friend in London - but they were not so artistically gifted as Galileo, so could only say that the surface of the moon looked like a tart the cook had made the week before, with some parts dark and some parts bright. When the London friend asked to see the tart, they replied they had eaten it....
He also showed a picture he took of a rather gorgeous church in Rome, where Galileo had been forced to repent of his views on astronomy by the Pope. And there was a picture of the Virgin Mary which a friend of Galileo had painted, using Galileo's drawings of the moon as the basis for the moon that Mary was standing on - up to date science right there in the church.
And there was Leonardo da Vinci's first drawing of the moon, on a scrap of paper which had also been used as a shopping list - written in backwards Italian, because Leonardo couldn't just write an ordinary shopping list!
There was Van Eyck's painting of the Crucifiction with the moon - but he got it all wrong! It should have been a full moon when Jesus was crucified.
The part of the talk on Renaissance art was fascinating - there were so many connections between the artists and other famous people - like the painting that was commissioned by Amerigo Vespucci's dad (who also sat for it), and the Vermeer picture called The Astronomer, where the sitter was the man who invented the microscope, van Leeuwenhoek, and it's even possible to see which book of astronomy is open on the table.
So books on astronomy became more widely available, and some of them were beautifully illustrated (though he did show one very strange picture of Orion, who is facing the wrong way).
And then there was the art that was used to popularise science in the 19th century, like the tea cards that used to be collected, including The Race Into Space from Brooke Bond, which I collected - and so did Martin Griffiths, though it had a bit more of an influence on his future career than it did on mine!
And coming up to date with modern artists' renditions of planets, including some beautiful (though not entirely accurate) pictures by Chesley Bonestell, as well as some more recent ones - there's a whole school of artists out there doing what they call descriptive realism - or Space Art - and he mentioned David Hardy as one of the artists.
It was a fascinating talk - and he also had copies of his book there, Dark Land, Dark Skies: The Mabinogion in the Night Sky. I didn't have a chance to buy one last night, as I was offered a lift home and had to leave when she did, but I've sent off for it now, from Seren Books. I hope it'll encourage me to get out there and look at the night sky a bit more!

Astronomy and Art, Welsh Myths and Legends

This sounds like exactly my cup of tea!

According to Sue Hodgetts, of the Cusop History Society:

"Friends of St Mary’s, Cusop present an evening with Martin Griffiths “Astronomy and Art, Welsh Myths and Legends” on Friday February 2nd 2018, 7.30pm at Cusop Church. Tickets £6 (students £4) from Sue & Keith 01497 822523, Celia Cundale 820396 or on the door.
Martin Griffiths, astronomer and science presenter with Dark Sky Wales, former senior lecturer in Astronomy at the University of South Wales, was a founder member of NASA's Astrobiology Science Communication team. He assisted the Brecon Beacon national parks successful campaign to gain International dark sky status and in 2014 became Director of the Brecon Beacon Observatory. He is the local representative for the BAA campaign for Dark Skies.
He is internationally renowned for making astronomy exciting and accessible and in this wonderfully illustrated talk he shows us astronomically interesting art and objects combined with Welsh literature that tells us something of our heritage of the night sky. His latest book is “Dark Land, Dark Skies” published by Seren Books."

Dark Skies over Llanthony Priory

Here's an interesting event for anyone who can get out to Llanthony Priory on Friday - astronomers from Dark Skies Wales will be there from 7pm with telescopes, talking about the constellations from both Greek and Celtic perspectives, and going on to investigate planets, galaxies and nebulae.
What a wonderful place to go star gazing!

Booking is essential, and tickets are available from Eventbrite at £11.35 each.

Pale Blue Dot

The title of the talk refers, of course, to Earth as seen from space, as described by Carl Sagan back when men were walking on the Moon.
The speaker was the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, who was introduced as one of the great science communicators of the present day, and as someone who had been supportive of Hay Festival and had encouraged the science part of the programming, which is now 30% of the total.
I saw him at LonCon, the World SF Convention for 2014 - he held a large hall spellbound then.
The Good Energy Stage was packed full - I got a pretty good seat off to the side, quite by accident. Martin Rees started off with the Pale Blue Dot of Earth, and took us out through the solar system, showing pictures from the Curiosity Rover on Mars, and a picture of storms around the pole of Jupiter which had only been released two days before - so right up to date! Beyond our solar system, he talked about the other solar systems in our galaxy discovered by the Kepler space telescope, including the seven planets of Trappist-1 - the inner planets of that system have a "year" of only a few of our days.
And out we went again, to the millions of galaxies beyond our own - that we can see. He described it as like being on a ship at sea - you can see ocean out to the horizon, but you know it goes on beyond that - but not how far. We can also see back in time for billions of years, as far as the first nanosecond after the Big Bang- which he also said was quite remarkable, since when he was a student, the accepted theory was the Steady State Theory, and the Big Bang was just a wild idea.
And then he went out even further, speculating about the multiverse, within which all those millions of galaxies we can see are just one tiny part, and different universes within the multiverse may have completely different laws of physics, depending on how they evolved over the first few seconds of existence.
He also talked about space exploration, and how it made much more sense to send robots than people - at the moment we are getting those amazing pictures of Jupiter and Saturn with 1990s technology, and the technology is improving all the time. He suggested that people going into space would be like Arctic explorers or extreme sports enthusiasts now - more Ranulph Fiennes than Neil Armstrong, and that these would be the people with the incentive to experiment on themselves to adapt to the extremely hostile environments they would be going to, with genetic adaptations and so on. When he's not being the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees is a member of the House of Lords, and sits on committees looking at the regulation of this sort of cutting edge science.
And then he brought it all back in again, back to the Pale Blue Dot - which should be cherished, because it's the only place in all that immensity that we are sure that life exists, and we should be doing our best to preserve what we have. "There is no Planet B," he said at one point, to some laughter from the audience.

The Stargazer of Hardwicke

I was lent a book, after someone I know saw a previous blogpost about Rev. Webb, the Victorian vicar of Hardwicke who was also a well-known astronomer.
It's a fascinating read.
In 1986, Janet and Mark Robinson moved into The Haven, just past the Hardwicke turning from Hay, to run it as a B&B. They knew it had been the old vicarage, and decided to do some research on what they thought would be a fairly boring old parson, who had been mentioned in passing by Rev. Kilvert in his famous diaries. At the time they knew nothing about astronomy - so they were surprised to find that Thomas William Webb was held in such high regard, mostly because of his book for amateur astronomers, Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes. In fact, their little research project grew into a book which has contributions from a range of astronomers, a geologist and a historian of science, and a foreword by Sir Patrick Moore!

Webb's early life gives an interesting view of what Oxford University was like in the early nineteenth century - Webb was a meticulous diary keeper, and also kept notebooks of his scientific observations, many of which, along with letters and other material, still survive, and are kept at the Library of the Royal Astronomical Society, Hereford City Library and Hereford Cathedral Library (see how useful libraries are!)
When he moved to Hardwicke, he did a lot of his early observations with a telescope he kept in the front hall and carried out onto the front drive at night, where he spent a lot of time kneeling on the gravel! Later he had a little observatory built in the garden, which was really just a wooden shed with a roof that opened up.
He also built a lot of his own equipment, especially in the early days. The best mirrors for telescopes were made of speculum, a metal made from copper, tin and a little arsenic, and astronomers like Webb would make these themselves, spending hours grinding and polishing. Later, he became friendly with local astronomers Rev. Henry Cooper Key of Stretton Sugwas, and George Henry With, the headmaster of Hereford Blue Coat School. Both of these men made telescope mirrors, but it was With who really made it into a serious sideline - he made over 200 over his career, both of speculum and the new technology of silvered glass. The silvered glass was lighter in weight, and easier to prepare, than the speculum, and mirrors could now be larger for more powerful telescopes. Webb didn't only know local astronomers, though - when he went on holidays to Europe later in life, he often visited astronomers on his travels.

Astronomy is having something of a resurgence locally, thanks to the Dark Skies initiative - Brecon Beacons National Park has some of the darkest skies in the country, and they are making efforts to reduce light pollution to keep it that way.
I went looking for a picture, and found this amazing shot from the Guardian:

Dark Skies Exhibition

The leaflet said there would be a free astronomy exhibition all weekend in the Ballroom at the Swan - but there had been a bit of a problem. The organisers of the event had chosen the same weekend for Dark Skies as a big Science Fair, and all the people selling telescopes and other instruments had gone there instead.
They're hoping to get a better date next year.
So they'd done their best in the room just by the front door, with a few displays and wall hangings, and slide shows, including a little bit about our local Victorian astronomer, the Star Man of Hardwick (mentioned on this blog on 29th January).
And now I want to find a supplier of the fabric that was used for some of the wall hangings, with star fields and the Moon surface and so on printed onto the cotton.

The Spaceguard Centre

It's the first day of the Dark Skies Festival today. They started off by observing the sunrise on the Equinox Line at Tredustan Court, not far from Hay, and in an hour or so, some hardy souls are going to go up to the car park on Hay Bluff to observe the night sky, and there has been a planetarium set up at Hay School.
This afternoon there was a trip out in a minibus to the Spaceguard Centre near Knighton. I've been wanting to go there for a few years now, but it's fairly remote, needing to be well away from the glare of street lights, so not accessible without a car.
It's a fascinating place. What they do is a fairly new area of astronomy, which is to search for Near Earth Objects - the sort of thing that could smack into the Earth with devastating results. As we travel through space, we pass through all sorts of debris like the dust from the tails of comets (which make shooting stars), and asteroids and comets have orbits around the sun that pass through our orbit. It's a good idea to find out where they all are, so that we have some warning when one is likely to hit us, especially the big ones that could cause tsunamis or mass extinctions.
It's all done without any funding at all, apart from the visitors to the site, though they did win a prize recently that meant they could replace all their old computers. Jay Tate set the whole project up, with his wife - because it needed doing. He comes from a military background, which made sense to me when he told us, because everything seemed so well organised, and his talk was very clear.
They don't allow unaccompanied access to the site, because it's a working observatory, but they do guided tours from Wednesday to Sunday every week, and it really is fascinating. I have now been up close to a rock which had white flecks in it that were older than our sun, a piece of the moon and a piece of Mars, all of which fell to earth as meteorites. When I next look out at the constellation Orion, I will know where the nearest star nursery to Earth is, in the nebula that forms Orion's sword (only about 1300 light years away). He showed us the telescopes they use, and pointed out the half built new dome outside. This is Project Drax. Other people, he said dismissively, use acronyms to make themselves look clever. Spaceguard uses the names of Bond villains!
The University of Cambridge have given them a telescope/camera which is much bigger than the ones they are using at the moment. They haven't been able to use it properly for twenty five years because of light pollution as Cambridge has grown around them. It was built, solidly, in 1950, and is still fit for purpose today - except they will be linking it up with a modern computer camera system. It was designed to be used with glass plates! At present it's in storage, and the local Astronomy Society and other volunteers have been building the dome. That's what volunteering ought to be all about - people coming together on a project because they have a passion for it, rather than to plug inadequate provision by the State.
So of course I bought a few goodies in the shop to help them towards their goal. After all, their aim is to save the Earth! (with no help from the government, by the way - Mr Tate said that there is not a single civil servant with responsibility for astronomy or finding out about the threat from asteroids - which also means he's not answerable to anyone in government, which he seemed rather pleased about).
It's a fascinating tour, and a worthwhile project, and they have a website at www.spaceguarduk.com

Dark Skies Festival

All the details are now up on the website at www.darkskiesfestival.org, and there are leaflets around town showing what events are on, over the weekend of 21st - 23rd March.
I've just ordered a ticket for the Friday trip to the Spaceguard Observatory near Knighton. I've wanted to go for a long time, but it's just not possible on public transport.
There are also trips up to Hay Bluff to observe the night sky from there, talks at the Swan, and a Planetarium at the school. There will be exhibits all weekend at the Swan, too.

The Star Man of Hardwick

Astronomers can set up just about anywhere - or at least, they could before the days of street lighting and the lighting of car parks and supermarkets and so on. William Herschel set up his telescope in his back garden in Bath, and was visited there by crowned heads of Europe. He was the first person on Earth to see the planet Uranus.
More locally, Rev. Thomas William Webb set up his observatory in the garden of the rectory at Hardwick, just a mile or so outside Hay. In 1859, he wrote a guide for astronomers called Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes, which became the standard reference for amateur astronomers right up to 1917. A revised version of the book was published in 1962, and it is still widely used, though the earlier editions are now collectors' items.
In fact, Herefordshire was a veritable hotbed of astronomical interest in the 19th Century. While Rev. Webb was writing his book, Rev. Key at Stretton Sugwas was a telescope pioneer and inventor, and the head teacher of the Blue Coat School in Hereford, George Henry With, made over 200 mirrors for telescopes. Rev Webb and his wife Henrietta were also keen on the new technology of photography.

(Thanks to Brian for telling me about this)

Dark Skies Festival

I came across a bookmark the other day advertising the first Hay-on-Wye Dark Skies Festival. The Brecon Beacons is a Dark Skies Reserve area, meaning that it is a good place for astronomy because of the lack of street lighting and so on. So on the weekend of 21st to 23rd March there are going to be a series of events, including watching the Equinox sunrise, lectures and talks, exhibition of equipment, a planetarium and something called Spaceguard.
There is a website at www.darkskiesfestival.org, but it tells you even less than the bookmark, and there is a mention of it at www.visitherefordshire.co.uk, again saying much the same. So I don't know who the experts are who are going to give the lectures, or where the lectures will be held, or how much, or how to book. Which is a pity, because I'd quite like to know more and go along to something.

"Didn't we have a lovely time...?"

The Travellers' Club were going to Bath, rather than Bangor (for those that remember the song), and the weather was glorious.
I've been to Bath once before, on a coach holiday about 25 years ago. We stayed at Pratt's Hotel, which had specially widened staircases up to the first floor so that sedan chairs could be carried up to a resident's room. I went to find the hotel again yesterday, and I have to say I hadn't realised that it was so posh!

It was originally five town houses, one of which was lived in for a while by Sir Walter Scott.

When I last visited, I went to the Roman Baths, but had missed out on the Fashion Museum, so this time I climbed the hill to the Assembly Rooms first. It was worth the £7.75 entrance fee - there are some fascinating dresses there (and a few items of male attire). The oldest dress there was the Silver Tissue dress, a Court dress from 1660, and the most recent was from last year. I also now know what a mantua is - I'd always vaguely imagined it was a sort of veil, but it is actually an eighteenth century Court dress which is fairly flat front and back, but sticks out about three feet on each side! If a lady turned round too quickly, she could knock people over!

At lunch time, I found the most wonderful tea room, underneath this shop:

They had a menu of different teas and coffees, and the most glorious cakes. I had the Russian Caravan Tea, originally carried on camel-back from China to Russia, and picking up a slightly smoky taste from the nightly campfires on the way, with the lemon drizzle cake. I got four cups of tea from the pot, which came with a timer. When the tea was ready to drink, it made a beeping noise so you could take out the infuser (and put it in a little bowl) for perfect tasting tea. I bought a bag of tea to take away with me, too.

In the afternoon, I went off the beaten track a bit to the William Herschel Museum of Astronomy. This is in the house where William and his sister Caroline lived - and I have now stood in the little back garden where the planet Uranus was discovered with a telescope Herschel had built himself, including hand polishing the mirrors.

Later I found the market hall, and picked up some beers from the local Bath Brewery from a wonderful wine, cheese and beer stall run by a Frenchman. Their symbol is a leaping hare, so I got Golden Hare, Wild Hare and Dark Side.

And to round it all off, I found a Hobgoblin pub near the coach park, (Hobgoblin beer is made by the Wychwood Brewery) where they had more Bath ales on hand pump, so I was able to try Barnsey and Gem, both of which were very nice.

Another lady on the coach was looking forward to visiting the American Museum, and she came back with a lovely little posy of flowers from them.

On the coach on the way home Sandra Havard, who runs the Community Support office, had some serious news. Funding has been cut over the last few years, while the need for the work they do has increased, and at the moment they are struggling to keep going month by month. It can't go on for much longer. There's a lot of bureaucracy behind the scenes that has to be done, with seemingly arbitrary targets that they have to meet (which wastes time when they could be doing what they were set up to do). So it may be that, at the end of September, the whole thing will have to close down. No more Travellers' Club, or Luncheon Club, or the One to One service they provide, or any of the other things that they have been doing to help the community over the past twenty years.

For the moment, they are still fund-raising. They are holding a Midsummer Concert with the Monday Choir at 7pm on Friday 19th July, at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Bettws, Clyro. The price of tickets is £7, including a drink and nibbles. And, of course, there was the raffle on the bus.

Astronomical Disappointment

There was a complete lunar eclipse early this morning, the first to be on the Winter Solstice since 1638 - and I missed it. Thick cloud covered Hay, though I'm told they had a good view in Scotland.
And the snow continues to fall. I went up to the Cinema to collect the bough of mistletoe I'd forgotten yesterday, in the rush to get away early. I told my colleagues that I was now looking for a man to go with it! "You should try your luck going through town," said Julia - and I'd only got a little way along Castle Street before another neighbour came along and said "Give us a kiss!"
The Council have been brilliant, digging narrow little paths all over Hay, and my new neighbour was out early too, digging a path for the removal men who are bringing the rest of the furniture (though they haven't managed to turn up yet).
I attempted to make a snow cat with the pile of snow she made. About half way through I almost gave up and called it a snow Glastonbury tor, but with a bit more sculpting it now looks like - a wierd shaped lump. Oh well.
While I was out there (and before Mr Pugh was about) I dug out his path for him.