At the society's first meeting of 2006 held on 5th January, we were pleased to welcome the return of Dr Lisa Wright as our speaker. She gave a talk entitled 'The Milky Way Outside/In'. She began with a history of how the milky way was mapped. Using crude instruments the distribution of stars and then density were determined. Later, the positions of globular clusters showed the galaxy's centre and ceiphids allowed the true distances to be derived.We were shown via animated movies, a tour of the galaxy culminating in a journey to it's centre where a super massive black hole is thought to lurk. An interesting 'question and answer' session at the end gave the members a rare opportunity to discuss modern astronomy with a profesional astronomy researcher.
The next meeting to be held as usual at the 'Friends Meeting House' in Granville Road, Clacton on February 2nd has our chairman Peter Carlo, giving a presentation entitled 'Space Flight'