You know what’s coming; resistance is futile; we live in London after all. The last session of the 2023 -24 season, despite some forecasts saying we would be fine, well the clouds didn’t clear for us. Now, before you all start saying “oh no that’s a shame”, we had a great time!!!
We were joined by ROG astronomers Jess, Andy and Josh, and they refused to put a dampener on the evening and, one way or another, they would make it a good evening. Andy kicked us off with a fascinating talk about the G.E.T and allowing the members to move this 28-ton of a beast around, supervised by Josh and I must apologise that, during this time my walking stick fell to the ground giving the astronomers a shock (my bad 😉) and Jess was explaining the Dome and controls, including the anemometer display and allowed our members to move the dome around.
As we walked over to the planetarium, I thought “not sure how Josh is going to follow Andy’s talk” but we were in for a shock. Josh asked if there were any planets we wanted to know about. Saturn and Jupiter came up so, just to be different, I said “Pluto”. Now, before you go saying “that’s not a planet”, I know. It only meets two out of the three criteria set by the International Astronomical Union in 2006, but people of a certain age were brought up knowing it as the 9th planet, so nah nah.
Josh started the show off with an entertaining guide to the night sky, showing us the constellations and where they can be found and why they were called what they are. For example, did you know Andromeda was the first Beyonce. That’s right, you read it correctly 😊. We moved swiftly on to nebulae and how to find them. Afterwards, we moved on to the aforementioned planets for a quick tour of them and their unique features. Josh ended the show with a Q&A session.
In conclusion, this was one of the great plan b’s.
Thanks to all our ROG colleagues that have supported us in these sessions this season and to our very own Barry and Gurinder for putting in the hard work of organising them.
Images by Simon Hurst
