Annual Meeting 2025
We held our meeting on Saturday the 28th of June 2025 at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. Members can expect the usual meeting report in a future issue of the DSO, but we'd like to thank everyone who came along, and all who helped out.
Speakers
We hope you all enjoyed the talks, and on behalf of the Webb Deep-Sky Society I would like to thank all our speakers.
Adrian Orr had the honour of our first talk of 2025 with his Visual Observation of the Deep Sky - A Personal Perspective
, and personal it was. He told us about his first encounters with the night sky, his return and his current obsessions, and larger telescopes. He spoke about why he believes he's cured his aperture fever, even if he has a larger scope on the way, emphasising filters and the importance of real dark adaption to improve contrast at the eyepiece. Perhaps most importantly he's a fellow sky atlas addict.
Next we welcomed a familiar speaker, Nick Hewitt on Hubble and the Cepheids
. It's the centenary of Edwin Hubble's first paper that used the period of cepheid variable stars prove the great distance to the spiral nebula known as M31. Coming in the wake of the Great Debate, this proved that M31 could not be part of our own Milky Way galaxy. This was a story full of big characters and egos, and also so many contributors that have been unfairly overlooked.
After lunch it was Tony Booer's turn to tell us about Easy, Affordable, Addictive – Electronically Assisted Astronomy
. Tony outlined the different approaches to EAA, but focused on his own digital version with a camera attached to a computer. His equipment has become increasingly sophisticated, but Tony explained the basic requirements, including some of the available EAA software. He also showed us a number of much simpler setups that are capable of remarkable results. EAA certainly isn't conventional visual astronomy, but it's not imaging either, and it offers another way to study the night sky.
Ronald Stoyan, CEO of German language astronomy publisher Oculum-Verlag, joined us with his story about Interstellarum Deep Sky Atlas and Guide — why and how to create a best-selling star atlas and guidebook
. This was a ten year project of remarkable complexity with which Ronald was personally deeply involved. His own visual observations supplied a great deal of the information encoded in this excellent atlas. It was an insight into the work that goes into some of the publications we sell, and some interesting projects to come.
Finally, our professional keynote talk by Prof. Paul Crowther of University of Sheffield on Wolf-Rayet Stars
. Prof. Crowther is a spectroscopy enthusiast who restrained himself to only a couple of spectra during this talk. These stars are remarkable objects in their own right, but they're also the driving force behind many of the most spectacular deep-sky objects in the night sky. They're found in regions of star birth and also death, observable not only in our own galaxy. Massive and hot their short lives provided a fascinating talk.
