Bath Astronomers
Looking up at the night sky, wherever I am, I can let go of the past and the future and feel part of the universe.
Simon Holbeche, Bath Astronomers
Moon from an urban garden Photograph: Karen Cripps
What we are
Bath Astronomers was established in 1976 as the Bath Astronomical Society, though our logo amusingly says 1781. That date is when William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus from the garden of 19 New King Street and put Bath and Astronomy on the map.
We are a club with three core activities. The first is learning about and understanding Astronomy together. Our 101 members attend talks about deep space and all the excitement of solar system missions and discoveries. These talks occur once a month at the Herschel Museum of Astronomy (herschelmuseum.org.uk) , which is owned and run by the Bath Preservation Trust (bath-preservation-trust.org.uk). (The Bath Astronomers’ website bathastronomers.org.uk has a list of talks coming up, all open to ‘Members and the curious’.)
We also try to train people on their own telescopes. We arrange observing nights for members to share tips and tricks. It is an opportunity to ask the embarrassing questions: ‘I don't know how this works; can you tell me about it?’ Or if a member is thinking about buying a particular piece of kit, they can usually find someone who has one and ask if there are any problems with it.
Our third activity is outreach. About 15 of our members take part in that.
Working with the Herschel Museum
Herschel Museum volunteers
We have a partnership with the Museum. We use their facilities for free. In return we provide their stargazing resources. When they have an observing night at the Museum or a talk about the summer solstice, equinoxes, that kind of thing, we will be the people doing the talking. The Trust have their own learning and development team and learning development officers who we'll work alongside at the Museum bringing certain aspects of the Herschel family and their work to life.
The Museum applies for grant funding for equipment. For example, they've just purchased a special electronically assisted astronomy telescope that doesn't have an eyepiece. It works via iPads etc. but it's able to better see through the light pollution above Bath. We are able to use it as part of the outreach programme that we operate with the Museum.
We have an inflatable mobile planetarium on loan from the University of Bath, which we use with schools and other young people's organisations. It is a big dome that is inflated with an air blower and there's a little sealed doorway to let the audience inside. We project on the inside of the dome to guide people around the skies. It works very well when, as per usual in the UK, it's a little bit inclement outside.
It was 200 years ago, on the 25th of August 2022 that William Herschel passed away. So, we've been working with the Museum on many of the commemoration activities. One was to create a 25-minute film about the Herschels in Bath and the discovery of Uranus. It's aimed at young children, so we've been using it when we run planetarium shows for primary schools.
Other outreach
We have a collaborative relationship with Bath Abbey. They have a regular tour programme that takes visitors to the top of the Abbey to have a look around. But when the Sun goes down, on Friday nights, there's a Bath Astronomer at the top to show people the starlit skies.
We’ve worked with the National Trust and English Heritage on bespoke one-off events. We took part in an evening among the stones of Stonehenge, during a lunar eclipse. English Heritage arranged all the event management, including a speaker, Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, one of the famous names from the BBC Sky at Night programme. We provided the telescopes and guides in and around the stones.
We go solo as well. We run public stargazing events by just setting up telescopes in various places. We've been trying to do a bit more in central Bath – Royal Victoria Park and other places, as well as unexpected locations like the Bath Park and Rides. Surprisingly, once you get to the Park and Ride places in Lansdown or in Odd Down, they're actually quite a lot darker than central Bath. Also, they're accessible by bus!
We run events at the Monkton Combe Community Observatory in conjunction with Monkton Combe School.
We're also working with Prior Park school. We are their consultants on where and how to build an observatory for community stargazing and for the Astronomy programmes they'd like to run in the future.
Solar eclipse Photograph: Karen Cripps
We were featured on the Sky at Night programme in July 2022. They filmed us at work during daytime, doing solar observing. We showed people how to look at the Sun safely so they could see the slow motion explosions on its surface. We talked about space weather and all those things.
We do family outreach evenings to try to get adults and children to look through telescopes together; to realise there is more to life than staring at iPads and mobile phones. This can be the most wonderful thing. For example, we show Saturn to people for the first time, people who almost thought it was a made-up thing. We point to it in the sky and look at it through a telescope. There is a huge intake of breath. as they realise it is real. They sometimes even walk around the telescope to see if we've stuck a little picture on the front.
When we do public outreach, we're never really sure if people are able to see through the telescope because eyesights differ. Many people won’t say that they can't see anything. They just say ‘That’s nice’. Looking at Saturn is the most wonderful thing because they don't say ‘That's nice’ if they can actually see it. They say ‘Wow’. They gasp. You can hear that they've seen it. Within our volunteer community, that's the reward we get back. That's the enrichment. We get to see those moments, when people realise that they're part of something bigger and feel ‘wow’. It is quite beautiful.
Inspiring children
In Key Stage 1 (age 5 - 7) and Key Stage 2 (age 7 - 11) of the National Curriculum, Astronomy is touched on just twice. So, in more than 250 weeks in primary school only 1 week is related to the Science of what is happening above your head. We try to support schools to do more.
There are activities that help galvanise the schools such as World Space Week 4th - 10th October (worldspaceweek.org) and British Science Week ten days each March (britishscienceweek.org).
We are part of the STEM Ambassadors network in the South West. (STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). We use the STEM network to advertise the help we can offer to schools. Typically, the schools bring us in for stargazing. The school will close at the end of the day. We set up telescopes in the playground while the children are at home having their tea. Then they come back in with their parents and we give them a stargazing tour of the night sky. We include craft activities and maybe the planetarium as well – all to help them engage with the world around them.
We offer suggestions for after school science clubs, such as logging on to the National Schools’ Observatory (schoolsobservatory.org) where the children can control a huge telescope, take photos of the Universe and actually do some science on them. They can work out how far things are away, or their orbital periods. They can prove for themselves what they read in science books as rote fact. They can develop the scientific approach of coming up with a theory and then gathering the information. It's really inspiring. I used to be an engineer working on aircraft and I'm really into that. Let the kids try something out; realise that it hasn't worked perfectly; think about how to change it; and then try it again and iterate to the solution. Get them thinking that way, because too many things are pre-packaged and ready-built - and no one knows how they work. So getting people to explore the complexity of the world, in any way we can, is important.
It doesn't have to be Astronomy. It can be any kind of STEM area. The National Curriculum is great, but it doesn't challenge some children enough. We hope that some of the things we do will take the children a little bit further.
And of course, for the 15 Bath Astronomers volunteers who do outreach, there's an altruism in it. We are potentially helping to inspire someone. And it doesn't have to be boring. Mathematics shouldn’t be boring. Physics shouldn’t be boring. We also try to bring in some diversity, so it's not just white middle-aged men coming into schools. We can bring in other people to talk about those same subjects and help the children think about what might be a great future for themselves.
Feeling part of something much bigger
Crescent Moon, with Earthshine* Photograph Karen Cripps
Realising there's a universe out there, puts our lives into context. For some people, that's a worrying context – ‘I’m such a small thing’. But others enjoy feeling part of something much bigger, something really beautiful in size and distances and time spans involved. It's amazingly cathartic. It's relaxing.
I think it is really helpful to get away from the daily grind and constant pressure to do all these very close, seemingly important activities. When we take people outside, looking up, just breathing and relaxing it is almost a therapy. It is like mindfulness.
Staring at the sky, watching a satellite coming across, thinking ‘Is that a star or something man-made? Oh, it's a satellite. I wonder which way it's going.’ Gently watching it go. And then a meteor comes whizzing past. The sky is full of surprises like that. There's always something to talk about. It gets people out of that stressful day-to-day routine. They don't need to rush around. They can stop and be part of something calming. People will do that on a summer's day. They'll go to the top of a hill and sit and watch nature. Well, they don’t have to wait for that perfect summer day. If they stare up at the night sky they can get a similar feeling of fulfilment, which is great for well-being.
Orion’s Belt from urban garden Photograph: Karen Cripps
And then, hopefully, we will also inspire a few people to wonder how something works. There are so many questions in Astronomy. We don't know what 95% of the universe is made of. We live in a world where explorers seem to have been everywhere. But if we look up, there are untold mysteries. Astronomy is a wonderful subject because it's the only science where we can't touch what we are studying. We have to use light to understand what is going on, breaking the light apart to see what stories it can tell us. Nowadays, because of all the space telescopes and amazing ground based telescopes, there's so much more information - and it is published immediately. We can go onto Twitter and follow the up-to-date data and recordings being taken by the James Webb space telescope (webb.nasa.gov ).
People first started talking about citizen science with a project called Galaxy Zoo (galaxyzoo.org) on the Zooniverse platform (zooniverse.org). Anyone can come home from their job or from school and log on to their computer and help scientists classify things, whether it is the breeding patterns of penguins in the Antarctic, or ‘is this a Galaxy that's exploding?’ or ‘Is this something weird in the night sky?’ ‘Is this a supernova?’. Anyone can be part of those research programmes just by sitting at home and using their computer.
People avoid the dark
In some ways rightly so, but in other ways not. We're absolutely fearful of going into unlit areas. The irony is that almost everyone carries a mobile phone and every single phone contains a torch. Not only is it a torch, if someone is afraid, they can have a live phone call with a friend. In trying to create environments where people feel safe, we actually overpower things with huge LED lights. Darkened doorways are now actually darker because you can't see into them due to glare. I'm not saying that people shouldn’t take sensible precautions about being out and about during the day or night. But we shouldn't actually live in fear. We have demonised the night.
Sky from the Chilterns Photograph: Karen Cripps
In the last few weeks, it has been very cold. One of the reasons it's getting cold is because the skies are clearing. It's very beautiful up there. Think about wrapping up warm and going outside to see how beautiful it is. We get to see the stars above our heads. If we’re lucky, we get to see the Milky Way. If, as a society, we don't have the perspective that we're part of a bigger thing we become very introverted.
We hear lots now about different types of pollution and destruction of the earth's environment. It is also happening with light pollution. Every February the CPRE, the Countryside Charity (cpre.org.uk), does a star count. The number of stars that people can see is reducing every year, because of the lighting decisions that people are making. The chances are we're unable to see the Milky Way if we live in a town or city in the UK.
In and around Bath, even two or three miles away from Bath, I have to use a laser pointer to indicate where the Milky Way is - a light band between darker areas. It is not visible because of light pollution.
More changes happening now
We did another CPRE event with professional bat watchers. We did a bat tour and then a stargazing tour back-to-back. The bat watchers talked about where the populations of insects were. The insects have moved into the only areas where there's no street lighting because with street lighting there's high predation from other things and those colonies of insects have been wiped out. Now the bats congregate where the insects still are, which is in the darker areas in the trees, in the roosting areas.
The other thing is that many LED street lights have a very high blue content and that blue is a trigger for waking up. This is useful for keeping drivers awake but messes up the diurnal rhythms of us and nocturnal animals
Another big change is the number of satellites that have launched. There used to be about 3000 active satellites above your head and now it is double that. A lot of them are in low Earth orbit, so they reflect light. About 300 satellites are above your head at any one time. You'll be looking at a constellation and parts of it appear to be moving. They're not part of it: those are satellites. The number of satellites is scheduled to go up by a factor of 10 in the next few years, so we will reach the point where there'll be more moving dots than static dots in our sky. That last vestige of beauty above us will be lost. It is mostly American companies that are funding these, and there are no rules in space, no litigation. We might be coming up to the last few generations where we can truly stare up at space and enjoy it as the next wilderness, untainted by human beings.
Looking forward as well as up
I was talking to someone yesterday about a programme called AstroBoost (ras.ac.uk/education-and-careers/astroboost), how we can move on from providing that first spark of inspiration to going back into schools with a programme so that we can build on it, to keep the fire lit. It is quite difficult for a club run by volunteers, but it's probably something we can do. That's where I'd like to take things. To be there for schools on an ongoing basis rather than these drop-in sessions. The drop-ins are very popular, but it would be nice to go back, be remembered and see the work the children have been inspired to do. It's not just what we're delivering now, but what we can help out with going forward.
We are not an insular club. We try to impact the people around us. If you are interested in looking beyond your cell phone, tablet and TV, we'll show you what's out there.
December 2022
* Earthshine is the light from Earth shining on the dark side of a crescent Moon
Bath Astronomers’ website is at bathastronomers.org.uk
Karen Cripps
Is a friend, film maker and photographer. All the photos attributed to her in this article were taken with a DSLR camera. For the closer ones she used an FE70-200mm zoom lens and cropped in a little.
For the Solar eclipse she used a filter on the camera and took the pictures through the partial clouds. She used the monitor screen on the back of the camera to view the sun, not the eyepiece.
For more of her work, follow her Nature channel on Facebook and see more of her astronomy pictures on Instagram.