October 2025 – News

21st October

Friends Outing: 36 Friends, across three groups, enjoyed a fascinating visit to the Science and Innovation Park at Wroughton, the Science Museum’s storage facility. The Hawking Building is full of amazing artefacts, from which the Wroughton staff selected a range of astronomical items for us to see. These included a mural quadrant and the original Heliometer from the Radcliffe Observatory, one of William Herschel’s reflectors, the Spacelab 2 X-Ray telescope that flew in space, the contents of Stephen Hawking’s office, and Sir Patrick Moore’s monocle! It was a fabulous visit; the only problem was that it was too short – the collection would take weeks to enjoy completely!

17th October

Friends Observing: The first observing session of the new Friends year was clouded out, so a Cloudy Alternative was offered. 12 Friends joined GKWJ at the Dome where a Friend who is an expert on meteorites guided us through the Wetton Meteorite Collection and further samples from his own collection. Close-up views of meteorite structure and composition were provided by the new USB microscope. It was a fascinating hour of space rock discovery.

Outreach Q&A: GKWJ chaired an Astronomy Question Time event in the Town Hall with a local professional astronomer and the Director of the North Wessex Downs National Landscape. A small (a clash with the closure of the High Street for the second Mop Fair did not help numbers!) but enthusiastic audience of twelve attended and enjoyed an hour of questions covering topics from astrophotography to local dark sky sites, satellites, manned missions to Mars, and observations from JWST bringing cosmology into question. All attendees received a free NWA chondrite and the best question of the event was rewarded with a small piece of lunar meteorite. Funds were raised from the sale of meteorites which will go towards more SQM devices for the Dark Sky project.