Winchester Weekend by Glynn Bennallick

The British Astronomical Association (BAA) annual Winchester Weekend was held at Sparsholt Agricultural College near Winchester from Friday evening April 9 to Sunday afternoon April 11. Frank, Nick, Phil and Glynn spent the weekend listening to a total of 10 different speakers. This may sound daunting to the uninitiated but they soon whizzed by with each speaker being a true amateur – he/she were true lovers of their subject and put their talk over in their own style, usually with good PowerPoint presentations.

The subjects ranged from practical tips for the DSLR astrophotographer through to observing the Moon; from the violently variable high energy Universe to talks from the BAA Solar Section on observing the Sun, now that the new solar cycle is underway.

However, we all agreed that the highlight was the main lecture given by Professor Bob Lambourne of the Open University entitled “The Accelerating Universe”. This was a real eye and mind opener from an excellent speaker who communicated difficult ideas about cosmology with humour and clarity. You could almost hear all the pennies dropping when he explained some of the cutting edge ideas and theories of the way the Universe is accelerating apart “taking the galaxies with it”. The revelation was the mind boggling idea that in the early period after the Big Bang, galaxies were initially moving away at 2.88 times the speed of light so that the light itself could not reach a theoretical viewer! We learnt also, that Hubble and Einstein got part their theories wrong. Isn’t hindsight a great thing, especially from us mere mortals who are standing on the shoulders of these giants. He finished his talk by putting together all the parameters of the expanding universe in an elegant but simple diagram. Excellent.

A bit of practical hands-on astronomy also formed part of the weekend. Many people had their Solar scopes out (safely) viewing the flares and corona and one little solitary sunspot on our nearest star. On planet Earth we managed to spot some great weatherdogs and an arc in the cloud layer. Frank had brought his scope and we discovered that by positioning a laser pointer down the eyepiece you could project it into the sky directly onto the object you are looking at (no, we didn’t shoot down any planes). On the way home via the Haynes Motor Museum and the Barbican in Plymouth and after a meal just inside the Cornish border, we viewed the lovely combination of Venus and Mercury in a glorious evening sky.

All in all a very enjoyable and illuminating weekend and we would recommend it to any member who has not been. Maybe next year (15 to 17 April 2011)?