Due to ill-health our speaker is not able to attend the January meeting. We have therefore agreed to cancel our scheduled meeting and will also therefore postpone our AGM. Sorry for the onconvenience.

We are pleased to say that Chris Starr has agreed to give us a talk in January. He will speak about “Our Beautiful Moon”. Chris has spoken at Beckington before, and his talks come highly recommended. We will also be holding our AGM which we will try to keep as brief and to-the-point as possible but remember that we are looking for new members to help with running the society.

We had our first meeting in March and it was a great success. There were lots of new members present as well as many “old lags”.

Thanks to everyone who came and thanks also for the topic suggestions and offers for giving talks. We will continue with our programme and look forward to seeing everyone again in April.

Remember that due to Good Friday, our meeting is a week later than normal, so the next meeting will be on 22nd of April – usual place (Beckington Baptist Hall) usual time (7:30pm).

We hope we find you well and still enthusiastic about the night sky and all things astronomical!
After a period of COVID enforced inactivity we would like to start our meetings again and would like your views on the Society and what you want from your membership and involvement.

Initially we propose to run a short season of Friday evening meetings, starting on 18th March 2022.  The following meetings will be on 22nd April, 20th May and 17th June.  The venue is, as before, the Baptist Church Hall, Frome Road, Beckington, BA11 6TD and meetings will begin at 7.30 pm.

This website has details of the location including Google Maps and Street View.
Our proposal is that we should keep our first few meetings relatively simple with this structure

• Welcome and Introduction
• Back to basics – a presentation and discussion on a topic about which people new to astronomy will have many questions and those with more experience will, hopefully, have just as many answers! We would like to make this session as interactive as possible, sharing information and building enthusiasm for our next full season when we propose to have outside speakers back at our Society meetings
• The current night sky – a guide to what can be seen now and what is coming soon
• Astronomy news – for example how is the deployment of the James Webb telescope progressing, updates on the various missions to Mars etc.

If possible we shall try and introduce some practical elements.  Perhaps a session on using your telescope or advice on how to get the most from binoculars.  Whilst the Baptist Church Hall is a little hemmed in by trees and buildings we are looking at solutions to make such sessions deliverable.

We hope that our members will be happy to participate by proposing topics for discussion and being ready to present those topics.  Topic suggestions will also help us decide which outside speakers we should approach for our next full season of meetings. 

We shall conclude our meetings with simple refreshments and again are hoping that we are all ready to help prepare, deliver and clear up the cups etc. Donations will help us cover the cost of refreshments.
Existing members who have paid for a year’s membership are of course able to attend these 4 meetings without further cost.

Non members will be asked to pay £3 per meeting.

Although we would have liked to restart in September, there was not enough interest. People are rightly still concerned about the COVID situation and without sufficient numbers, we cannot justify organising meetings.

Our current goal is to try to restart in the new year. We will target February 2022.

Apologies to our regular and putative new members. Let’s hope we can meet next year.

We hope to be able to restart our meetings on 17th September. Everyone welcome! We will kick off with an informal evening of short talks and discussions. This will be good chance to get to know everyone and to help shape the society for the year to come.

We will be taking subscriptions for new and existing members. People who were signed up for 2019-2020 will get a discount for the months that were cancelled.

Apologies to all our members that we have been unable to run our normal programme this season.

The situation regarding COVID-19 is still such that we cannot give a definite answer to the question “when will we start again”.

We are mindful that you have all paid subs for the full year and you may well be feeling short-changed by us.  As soon as we have the opportunity, we will convene our postponed AGM where we can discuss a sensible way forward.

Due to the on-going Covid19 crisis, we have decided to suspend our activities until the new season in September.

Please watch this space for further announcements.

We hope that you are all keeping safe and look forward to seeing you when our lives have returned to normal — whenever that may be.

Due to the on-going issues with the Corona Virus, we have reluctantly decided to cancel the March meeting.

The programme for next season 2019-2o20 is now on our main page!

See you in September.