Cardiff Astronomy Festival

A nice day out at the Cardiff Astronomy Festival last Saturday (25th July) hosted by the Cardiff Astronomical Society, at the Museum of Wales, Cardiff.

Three free talks, which sadly I was not able to attend due to manning the FAS stand.

There were a number of displays there - Telescope Planet had a big display of gear. Keiran McGrath brought alongs his SCS Astro gear. Paul Roche and the Faulkes team had an infrared camera that the kids found quite 'cool'. Martin Lunn had his Aurora Books along, and there were displays by Cardiff AS, Techniquest, and others that I don't completely recall...

However, I'm not sure it was quite the success of the previous festival held a couple of years back. Perhaps it was the time of year, and of course it was a rare sunny day.

Here are a few more pics:

.

Last Saturday's CAS Meeting

A really interesting talk by Sam George about work he has been doing trying to detect extra-solar planets using low frequency radio astronomy by their auroral signatures.

Interesting to note that Jupiter's radio 'disk' is about 2.5 degrees, and should be observable from quite some distance off - so the same should apply to extra-solar planets round other stars.

Sadly the work did not provide any positive results - perhaps the frequencies being observed at were too high, or the levels were too low for detection - or both.

It sounds like a really interesting field of work. Sam having recently received his PhD is off to Calgary on a post-doc to do some more work on this - so will be interesting to get an update in a couple of years.