Galactic Evolution - Robin Hughes (Vice-President)
Robin presented Hubble images of the early universe. Elliptical galaxy appear to be missing. This has led astrophysicsts to suggest that elliptical galaxies are formed by the fusion of spiral galaxies. The use of a galactic tree diagram shows how the disks in spiral galaxies get larger over time as they accrete more inter-galactic gas and dust. This rate of accretion decreases in time as the universe expands and these is less material to capture. The diagram also shows how galaxies collide and always create ellipticals no matter what shape they were to start with, creating a large elliptical in the centre of most galaxy clusters eg the Virgo Cluster. The Universe Review website has lots of information about galaxies.

Astronomical Imaging- Robin Waddling (Vice-President)
Robin showed a range of astronomical images.The first was of ngc 7603 which appears to be connected by a light filament to a nearby object, which has twice the redshift. Within the fialment are two brighter objects with much great red-shifts. Whilst this might initially appear to be another example of an Arp object with discordant red-shifts, there is a reasonable explanation. Using information from research papers copied onto the internet it appears that ngc 7603 is a Seyfert galaxy with a 'tail'. The object at the end of the light filament is a spherical eliptical galaxy and the two bright objects in the fialment are small, distant H(II) galaxies.The combinded image is very tantalising in its appearance and one paper has quoted the probability of this chance alignment as one in three hundred million. But then the universe is a big place!

Images of the surface or Mars and a video stream from Hubble of the heirarchical destruction of fragment B of Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 completed the presentation.

1924 And All That! - Bill Barlow (President)
Bill was born in 1924 and presented an enlightening talk abouth the advances that had taken place in astronomy and science within his lifetime. At the time of his birth only eight planets were known. The planets Venus and Mars were thought to be the most likely to be inhabited. No one had any idea about the energy source of stars, although chemical combustion was thought to be a totally inadequate explanation.The origin of the chemical elements was not understood. In 1924 it was known that some stars, known as White Dwarfs existed and these were thought simply to be old stars in the process of dying. Similarly the nature of galaxies was unknown. Subsequently Hubble proposed is 'tuning fork' diagram of galactic classification. Ideas about the Big Bang had yet to be developed. In 1924 there was matter and there was energy, the relation between them had recently been discovered by Einstein, but we now have Dark Matter which seems to hold the universe together and Dark Energy which is responsible for the accelerated expansion of the Universe. Our matter constitutes only about 4% of the total energy density of the Universe. The mystery deepens!