Annual Meeting 2026
We held our meeting on Saturday the 20th of June 2026 at our normal venue: 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.
Gerard Gilligan started our meeting with the history of William Lassell (1799—1880). Telescopes, Planets and Drinking Beer
. This is the story of a successful brewer made rich by the growth of Liverpool's trade, a man who turned a significant amount of his money into astronomical observatories with houses attached, becoming a renowned astronomer along the way: he met Victoria and Albert in addition to many famous astronomers from around the World! Lassell's was also a tale of aperture fever and foreign travel, and this man did not travel light.
Next we turned, or perhaps returned, to Keith Venables for his update on a story that began three years ago in A New Finder for Visual Observers
. At that time Keith spoke on the topic of dark adaption and mentioned his project to design and build a plate-solving efinder to make observing the very faint more effective. Since then it's become a comprehensive set of self-build instructions on his website, and now a product in conjunction with AstroDevices. This was the story of that journey that found its way to Sleepy Hollow and NEAF 2026.
After lunch it was the turn of Peter Maasewerd to amaze us with the detail he captures in his images of The Smoking Gun – Astro Photographies as Witnesses to Stellar Catastrophes
. Peter is dedicated to imaging supernova remnants (SNRs) from his suburban balcony in western Germany. His talk was a crime scene investigation drawing on the science of SNRs and the art of capturing and making the best use of the faint light of these huge structures derived from the death of a massive star. Whilst creating these beautiful representations he's made a few surprise discoveries, and arrived slightly too late for some too.
After a dose of astrophotography we turned to dedicated and enthusiastic large-telescope visual observer Mark Stuart to provide his notes on a small selection of Owen's Galaxy of the Month: A Year of Cosmic Highlights
. These were seven of his favourites from amongst those Owen chose for his long-running series, so there were some reflections on the man himself as well. Owen might have been taken aback at Mark's closing suggestion that he'd forgotten to cover the most obvious galaxy in the night sky, the Milky Way itself, an oversight that Mark rectified in the style of Owen Brazell.
Finally, our professional keynote talk was delivered by Dr. Rob Eyles-Ferris of the University of Leicester on The extreme and diverse deaths of massive stars being unveiled by the Einstein Probe
. Dr Eyles-Ferris works on high energy transients to understand the largest explosions in the universe. His particular research interests include tidal disruption events (TDE), fast X-ray transients (FXT) and gamma-ray bursts (GRT). In his talk we heard much about an FXT detected in 2025, EP250108a, which lead to some new insights on the mechanisms underlying these events. He then compared this to other similar extremely high-energy events, unravelling the meaning of the signals hidden in their light curves and spectra.
