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Another edition of ARIES has finally arrived. In it you will find an article by Tony Razzell about CCD imaging on the cheap, tales from that eclipse thing last year but the second part of the beginners article about deep sky objects, dealing with a variety of nebulae will be in the next issue. The CCD and eclipse article have been well illustrated by the respective authors, using their own images. I have also received an article from Maurice Batchelor, all about Sir William Herschel, his life, observations and telescopes. Maurice has also submitted a couple of his observations of the Sun which will be included in a future issue.
I thought that it was also time to include details of the committee in ARIES, so that everyone is up to date and knows who to contact. I would also like to start an ongoing series of members profiles, in which a picture and brief details of society members is included. At the moment, I do not know if this will ever get off the ground, it depends on you, the readers. I intend to collar the committee members first, to start the ball rolling, then hopefully, some non-committee members will participate. It will be entirely the choice of the individual to take part, anything written will be your words, not mine or anyone else's.
I am also conscious that there is a lot of humour in the Society that does not appear in ARIES, it would be great if someone could capture some of this and perhaps submit a cartoon or two, a humorous story or some astronomical jokes.
I was recently thinking about how far our knowledge of the universe has developed over the last century. For starters, a century ago, the Solar System contained only eight planets, although the search was on for another. The red spot on Jupiter was believed to be a solid body, floating in its atmosphere. Spacecraft only existed in the minds of a few visionary writers. 50 years ago, the space age was dawning, finally in 1957, it arrived. Space travel was the predominant theme in science fiction of the time, and society would be completely transformed by the turn of the century! Well, that never quite happened although there are many spin offs from the space programme as well as a greatly increased knowledge of our Solar System. We know now, thanks to Viking, that the dark areas on Mars are not seasonal vegetation patches. I was recently looking at a back copy of a magazine in which it was talking about what might be found when Voyager reached Neptune, that seemed strange, as did the paragraph that mentioned the Galileo probe. No one could have guessed the problems and ingenuity of the engineers who pulled that one out of the fire. Up until a few years ago, the existence of extra solar planets was not known. I am still a little sceptical, Jupiter sized planets orbiting in a few days - that doesn't sound likely to me. Surely the thing would be smashed by the immense forces involved? I am no mathematician, so I will have to go with the flow on that. I will believe when something more believable comes along.
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