Nick James

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  • in reply to: Fireball 23.40UT #610417
    Nick James
    Participant

    Headline on the front page of the site today from Jim Rowe (https://britastro.org/2022/12th-may-fireball). It looks as if this one might have dropped 100g or so of meteorites over a rather hilly bit of South Wales. An excellent piece of work by all of the camera networks in UKFAll.

    in reply to: Fireball 23.40UT #610295
    Nick James
    Participant

    I just caught the very beginning of the trail on my SW facing UK004F camera at Chelmsford. This is the streak on the right side of the attached image. The GMN trajectory solver has a trajectory from UK0002, UK000W, UK003N, UK004F and UK004X which you can see here (https://tammojan.github.io/meteormap/) if you select the latest_daily solutions. It was also picked up by 3 French and 2 British cameras of the Fripon network and their analysis is here: https://fireball.fripon.org/displaymultiple.php?id=17507.

    in reply to: PR Her #610129
    Nick James
    Participant

    Yes, nothing there that I can see.

    Nick James
    Participant

    Paul, yes that’s the one.

    Nick James
    Participant

    Cees Bassa responded to my video pointing to this tweet from Jonathan McDowell:

    https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/1520284820450025472

    It was the de-orbit burn for the Angara AM second stage launched from Plesetsk yesterday.

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by Nick James.
    in reply to: Brookhaven on the market #609878
    Nick James
    Participant

    It is one of my favourite books too. Lovely descriptions of a lost time. I bought a second hand hardback of the 1967 edition a while ago for around 50p.

    $550K for a big house and ten acres seems a steal but it’s not selling. I’ve just had a nose on Google Streetview. Looks very nice although there has been a lot of development around there since Peltier’s day.

    in reply to: Ron Arbour #609669
    Nick James
    Participant

    I was honoured to speak at Ron’s funeral on Monday. It was very well attended and many BAA friends were present. An obituary will appear in the Journal in due course but, for now, I attach my tribute.

    Attachments:
    in reply to: Winchester Weekend 2022 #609667
    Nick James
    Participant

    It was a brilliant weekend and my personal highlight was the Steve and Dave double act on Sunday. A very entertaining presentation about the Crayford Dobsonians. All the other talks throughout the weekend were great too. Shame I missed the Friday night.

    Thanks very much to Ann and Alan and everyone else involved in arranging it.

    in reply to: possible nova in M31 #609165
    Nick James
    Participant

    I think it is at least the sixth this year.

    Have a look here for an up-to-date list. They often don’t get announced in ATELs.
    Currently TNS[/url] is the main database now but some discoverers still post on the TOCP.

    There tend to be several novae a month in M31 but a lot of people are looking for them so it is hard to claim a discovery. George Carey got AT2022eng recently along with Kamil and the Czech team.

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by Nick James.
    • This reply was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by Nick James.
    in reply to: Detection and observation of Earth impactor 2022 EB5 #609018
    Nick James
    Participant

    I’m not surprised it got silly. The slug was an odd one though. It was the unit of gravitational mass in the FPS system but I don’t think it got used much.

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 5 months ago by Nick James.
    in reply to: Images and attachments to forum posts #609000
    Nick James
    Participant

    Thanks for explaining that Dominic. I know that a huge amount of work has gone into the new site and it will take some time to iron out the problems but I didn’t know whether this was by design or not.

    in reply to: Detection and observation of Earth impactor 2022 EB5 #608992
    Nick James
    Participant

    This was an interesting event. A few minutes before impact it would have been visible at around 11th magnitude moving rapidly across the sky as seen from the UK.

    I like examples of NTUs (non-technical units) when describing the characteristics of astronomical objects. Bill Barton alerted me to this classic example in the Mail Online.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10610491/Asteroid-half-size-giraffe-strikes-Earth-coast-Iceland.html

    Attachments:
    in reply to: Ron Arbour #608602
    Nick James
    Participant

    I first met Ron not long after he became a TV star for his early recovery, with Alan Young, of 1P/Halley and have always marvelled at the quality of his work. He was very innovative and came up with loads of excellent ideas including is own cold camera and comet offset guiding attachment. There is a pretty good summary of Ron and his work along with a photo of Ron with his home-built 16-inch here:

    http://mstecker.com/pages/apparbour.htm

    His SNe discovery record is testament to his skill and dedication. Ron always regretted replacing that telescope with an “inferior” commercial instrument and mount.

    I will miss our regular email exchanges and my annual meeting with Ron and Pat after Winchester when I would discover what new equipment Ron was testing, usually in the living room. Pat was very tolerant.

    Another of the BAA astronomy greats gone. Deepest condolences to Pat.

    in reply to: New website feedback #608389
    Nick James
    Participant

    Not just images but files (PDFs, text files). We used to be able to do that.

    in reply to: New website feedback #608388
    Nick James
    Participant

    Why have such a low limit? Maybe increase it to 10 to be sure. If we start getting spam posts from members then we can handle that at the time.

    in reply to: New website feedback #608345
    Nick James
    Participant

    Thanks for putting the recent forum posts listing back on the front page.

    in reply to: New website feedback #607977
    Nick James
    Participant

    On the old site the latest forum posts were on the front page but this is not currently the case with the new site. That is a shame since the forum is the most interactive part of the site. I know that you can get to the forum via the community tab but many people and casual visitors will not bother to do that. Can we get the latest forum posts back on the front page please?

    in reply to: Following JWST through Orion to L2 #585271
    Nick James
    Participant

    My astrometry gave 16.1 last night for JWST. It varies a lot. It is still moving north and it reaches max declination north (about +19 deg) about mid March. It will cross the equator in the middle of April and then head south for a while. I haven’t tried for the booster since Feb 10 when it was around mag 20.3.

    in reply to: Comet of the Month 19P Borrelly #585259
    Nick James
    Participant

    That is a very unusual mount but clearly very effective since he discovered 10 comets from 1873 through to 1912:

    19P/Borrelly, C/1873 Q1 (Borrelly), C/1874 O1 (Borrelly), C/1874 X1 (Borrelly), C/1877 C1 (Borrelly), C/1889 X1 (Borrelly), C/1900 O1 (Borrelly-Brooks), C/1903 M1 (Borrelly), C/1909 L1 (Borrelly-Daniel), C/1912 V1 (Borrelly)

    I assume that they were all with this instrument but I haven’t checked.

    in reply to: The death of Rob Moseley #585238
    Nick James
    Participant

    This is such a shock. I met Rob quite a few times in the 90’s. He was a great observer and did a lot for the Lunar Section at that time. Rob observed quite a few comets too and we have some examples of his notebooks in the Comet Section archives:

    https://britastro.org/cometobs/1969y1/1969y1_19700331_0345_rmoseley.html
    https://britastro.org/cometobs/1987p1/1987p1_19871028_rmoseley.html
    https://britastro.org/cometobs/1988a1/1988a1_19880510_rmoseley.html

Viewing 20 posts - 281 through 300 (of 956 total)