Astro Wednesday going strong

Today marked the twelfth meeting of the lunchtime Astro-Wednesday club. The students numbers while remaining much the same to these little gatherings are spreading out across a wider set of groups. Today we looked in some depth at the constellation of Draco in operatically some of the many deep sky objects like M13 that are readily accessible to small telescope. Speaking of which, none of the group have yet managed to assemble one of the small kits that I handed out a short while ago, and so I suggested that we come in over break and spend a half day, it seemed to go down very well. This was followed by a usual start of month look at what is coming in the night sky from morning and evening planets to some of the other star groups. Conversation broke into looking at space art, which is I feel an area of the whole subject that few seem to appreciate, but one of the group had found a web link and we spent some time looking at the various impressions. One particularly interesting audio slide show on the BBC news site featured Plasma from the sun, which tied in very nicely with our recent talks on space weather. Though the students sport an empressive array of mobile devices and the equally impressive astro apps that are appearing for them, the popularity of laminated cards are certainly proving to hold there own special attraction!