Welcome to the Astronomical Society of South Australia

ASSA members Dean Davidson, Ian Blackwell and Paul Martinaitis will be looking at some of the things you can construct at home to make your observing life easier. Relatively simple projects that will be presented and discussed will include DIY observing chairs, a parallelogram binocular mount, and an Alt-Az mount. We will also present a 12-inch "Dob in a Box", an eyepiece box, and (hopefully!) a progress report on a 14-inch go-to binocular. This show will be streamed LIVE with the opportunity to ask questions via chat.

As a conclusion to the series on Stellar Evolution, we will take a look at Variable Stars. This will include exploring such objects as cepheid variables, long period variables like Mira, eclipsing binaries and cataclysmic variables like Eta Carina.

From 1609 to 1613 Galileo used his own astronomical telescope of unprecedented precision and power to make an avalanche of astounding new discoveries. This triggered a revolution in the way humanity sees its place in the cosmos. Some of these discoveries are well known like the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus and the lunar landscape. But there is a surprise drawn from the pages of Galileo’s logbooks. He notes the position of a "fixed star" that does not exist in any star chart. This is because it is really the planet Neptune which Galileo observed 234 years before its official discovery. Remarkably, the notes from Galileo's observations reveal he observed Neptune move on two successive nights of January 1613. Did he know this "fixed star" was a planet? If so, this would be the first discovery of a new planet by humanity since deep antiquity. As I will discuss, evidence that Galileo realised he had seen a new planet could still be hidden deep in his notebooks. In this talk, Professor Jamieson will report on his examination of Galileo's notebooks and tell us what he found and what still might be undiscovered.