Useful links
 

All times are UT unless otherwise stated.

 

Weather

  • Satellite sequence of visible cloud over the UK:  Visible
  • Satellite sequence of cloud cover over the UK seen in IR over last 105 minutes. Infra-red
  • Mean Surface Level pressure chart for Europe from the Met Office MSL
  • Hourly observations from Herstmonceux (Met Office) Herstmonceux
  • Met Office weather via BBC..Dark Site
  • Metcheck Forecast.  Click on Hobbies and Astronomy and enter postcode (for Dallington TN21 9NL) Metcheck

 

Time

  • A summary of time (set your time zone (to 0) and latitude ~ Dallington 0.36E; Bexhill/Battle 0.48E; Hastings 0.60E.  Click here for other Sussex towns).
  • Astronomical Clocks
  • Julian to Heliocentric Julian Date converter.  JD to HJD
  • Local Sidereal Time calculator.  Insert your desired longitude as decimal degrees (Bexhill ~ 0.483; Hastings ~ 0.60; Dallington ~ 0.367)... LST

 

Sun, Moon, Planets and Meteors

 

Periodic Table of Deep-Sky Objects

Here’s a really cool table made by Tom Urbain that sorts and groups all the star clusters, nebulae, galaxies and other objects in the Messier catalogue to give a very helpful overview:

Messier Periodic Table

 

Object Visibility

Staralt is a program that shows the observability of objects in various ways: either you can plot altitude against time for a particular night (Staralt), or plot the path of your objects across the sky for a particular night (Startrack), or plot how altitude changes over a year (Starobs), or get a table with the best observing date for each object (Starmult). For further information, click on the "help" button at the bottom of the page.

Coordinates (copy and paste) Battle 50.92 +0.48 Bexhill 50.83 +0.48 Dallington 50.95 +0.37 Hastings 50.85 +0.60

Object use formant of RA and dec i.e. hh mm ss.s (+/-)dd mm ss.s (note the spaces between each group of digits). Note that you can enter more than one object and you can display the Moon's position through the night.
 

Finder Charts

This service provides online access to digitised optical Schmidt plates from the STScI Digitised Sky Surveys DSS and DSS-II. The Digitized Sky Surveys were produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166. The images of these surveys are based on photographic data obtained using the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the UK Schmidt Telescope. The plates were processed into the present compressed digital form with the permission of these institutions. The data is produced by the University of Leicester ~ LEDAS

 

The Sun's Neighborhood

The purpose of RECONS is to understand the nature of the Sun's nearest stellar neighbors, both individually and as a population. Our primary goals are to discover ``missing'' members of the stellar sample within 10 parsecs (32.6 light years), and to characterize all stars and their environments within that distance limit. New members are found via astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic techniques, and through searches for stellar, brown dwarf, and planetary companions at small and large separations. Characterization includes photometry and spectroscopy at both optical and infrared wavelengths, as well as determinations of the luminosity function, mass function, and multiplicity fraction of the nearby stars. RECONS is currently extending survey work to 25 parsecs in an effort to understand the Sun's and Earth's places among a larger population of our neighbors.

 

Exoplanets

The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia is a working tool providing all the latest detections and data announced by professional astronomers, useful to facilitate progress in exoplanetology.  The encyclopedia, started in 1995,  is updated daily by Jean Schneider from the Paris Observatory ~ Encyclopedia

 

Databases

Access to Simbad, VizieR, Aladin, catalogues etc.   Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg

 

Astro-Photography

A useful overview of astro-photography ~ Imaging : An introduction to the gear of astro-photography

Find us

Meetings:
Egerton Park Indoor Bowls Club,
Egerton Road,
Bexhill, East Sussex,
TN39 3HL

 

May Meeting:
Venue to be announced

 

Meetings are held on the first Thursday of each month from 8pm to 10pm

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