Huddersfield Astronomy Society

16/06/2026

Astro social this eve 7pm @ The Pavillion!

05/05/2026

Astro Social Tonight
Pavilion HRUFC Lockwood
See you there!

22/04/2026

Fabulous evening yesterday down at The Garden of Stars with perfect viewing and excellent turnout! 🌌🌟🌠

20/04/2026

Garden of Stars Astronomy Evening!

Tuesday 21st April - 7pm @ Garden of Stars, YWT Stirley, Hall Bower Lane HD4 6FA
See you all for a little Venus, Jupiter and Moon observing. Telescope on site.

HAS/YWT members £2
Non members £3
Under 16 Free

(note: HRUFC Lockwood Clubhouse CLOSED)

02/04/2026

The Artemis II crew are on their way to a 10-day mission around the Moon!

The crew on won't be landing on the Moon, but will instead circle it, and will travelling further from Earth than anyone has ever been before.

4 astronauts – commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen are on board.

3 Fun facts about the Artemis II launch 🚀

1. Artemis II is taller than Big Ben
At 30 storeys high – 98m, Artemis II 2m taller than the London clock tower.

2. The crew will travel farther from Earth than any other humans before
The flight path will take Artemis II around 402,000km (250k miles) away from Earth, beating Apollo 13, with the total journey being over 1 million km (620k miles) - equivalent to driving coast to coast across the US more than 200 times!

3. The rocket’s engines previously launched 22 Space Shuttle missions.
3 of the engines onboard are refurbished Shuttle engines, and all 4 engines contain at least one part that flew on the first Space Shuttle back in 1981.

This is a bright day for humankind.

Would you take the offer of going to outer space if you could? While a space lover, your social media secretary would prefer to keep her feet firmly on the ground!

06/03/2026

🚨🚨NEW DATE ANNOUNCED! Tuesday the 7th of April. See you there!

PUBLIC LECTURE ALERT! - “MACHINES TO UNLOCK SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE” by Ellie Crossley-Fells

Could we create microscopic black holes? Where is all the antimatter? Why do we smash atoms together in huge machines? And what can they tell us about our universe?

Ellie, our resident aspiring physicist will give you a fun and accessible tour of the subatomic world and the key concepts in particle physics, and how scientists smash particles together at the speed of light to solve major mysteries about the fabric of our universe.

7pm Tuesday the 7th April 2026
Pavilion, HRUFC Lockwood Park,
Huddersfield HD4 6EN
HAS & YWT members £3
Non HAS members £5
Under 16s (accompanied by ticket paying adult) FREE
Suitable for ALL levels!

16/01/2026

A mysterious bar-shaped cloud of iron has been discovered inside the iconic Ring Nebula!

The Ring Nebula (M57) is a planetary nebula around 2,300 light years away from us. It was formed when a star reached the end of its life, but wasn't quite big enough to turn into a neutron star or black hole, so it collapsed into a white dwarf, and threw out lots of ionised gas into space, creating the pretty colours we see.

The bar (pictured in red on the first image) across the central star emits only in strongly ionised iron. This introduces a previously unreported structural component to the Ring Nebula. The bar's length is roughly 500 times that of Pluto’s orbit around the Sun, with the mass of iron atoms comparable to the mass of Mars.

More detailed observations are required to determine how the iron bar formed, it is likely associated with the central regions of the nebula, but there is the possibility the iron could be an arc of plasma from the vaporisation of a rocky planet caught up in the star’s earlier expansion!

In the image, the bright outer ring is made up of light emitted by three different ions of oxygen. The red bar across the middle is due to light emitted by a plasma of four-times-ionised iron atoms (4 electrons have been removed from the atoms- that requires a LOT of energy!)

These iron emission lines are rare and cannot be seen with the naked eye. Instead we use instruments like WEAVE'S Large Integral Field Unit (LIFU) to obtain spectra of the Ring Nebula. A spectra measures the electromagnetic radiation coming from a star, showing characteristic absorption or emission lines that reveal the star's physical and chemical properties - think of it like a 'fingerprint' of light that tells us what the object is made of!

Full study here: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf2139

03/12/2025

Microscopic black holes, cosmic microwaves and the elusive Dr Brian Box from an alternate universe wearing Dr Sheldon Cooper's shoes...

THANK YOU to all of you who attended the quiz last night! We raised over £150. This money will go towards keeping our amazing club up and running, and allow us to keep teaching the people of Huddersfield and beyond about astronomy.

Big well done for getting involved and I hope you learned something new too! I really enjoyed being your quizmaster and cannot wait to do it again next year!

Stay tuned for more events and public lectures in 2026!

- Ellie

17/11/2025

TOMORROW! See you there!

PUBLIC LECTURE - “DID THE BIG BANG REALLY HAPPEN?” by
John Waterhouse. One not to miss!

7pm TUESDAY 18TH NOVEMBER 2025
Pavilion, HRUFC Lockwood Park,
Huddersfield HD4 6EN

>“Did The Big Bang Really Happen?” By John Waterhouse<

Can we convince ourselves that the Big Bang really did happen? Only by considering the evidence, and we do have some. We have some theory too. But do they match and is this enough? See what you think?

Tuesday 18th November 2025

7.00pm@Bowling Pavilion, HRUFC Lockwood Park HD4 6EN

HAS & YWT members £3

Non HAS members £5

Under 16s (must be accompanied by ticket paying adult) FREE

14/11/2025

✨✨✨Intro to Astronomy Class of 2025! ✨✨✨
Thank you for being a fantastic set of students, we hope you enjoyed the course and learned something new.
Tell your family, friends, colleagues about us and who knows, they might be the Class of 2026!
We look forward to seeing you at our future stargazing sessions and public lectures, welcome to the club!!

- From Ellie, Gain & Robert squared! 📚