Kennet Valley TR Group look to the STARS at their October Club night!
Kennet Valley TR Group members looked to the Stars at their October Club night with the visit of Professor Iwan Williams and his intriguing Astronomy presentation.
Iwan has had a distinguished career, on completion of his PhD at Royal Holloway, Iwan was appointed a Lecturer at Reading University in 1963, as a Reader at Queen Mary in 1971 and promoted to Professor in 1987. He was Dean for Research 1991-97 and Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences 1999-2002. Since 2009, he has been Emeritus Professor.
Probably his most famous activity was his involvement in the ESA project Rosetta, a mission to land on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, launched in 2004. On November 12th 2014, after a 10 year journey and a brilliant feat of engineering and calculation putting Rosetta in orbit around the Comet, the Philae probe separated from the Rosetta orbiter at 07h30 UTC.
Even KVG TRs are like STARS as six turned out this the first dark evening meeting of the Autumn!
Some nice images were obtained both by Philae and Rosetta (you can see these in the presentation download), while close to the comet. Unfortunately, Philae bounced twice before finally coming to rest at 17h31, about 1km from the intended site and unfortunately all the science experiments were lost, but even now Iwan pinches himself that he was involved with such a mission. To see Iwan's presentation please download it here: Night-Sky-over-Reading-Iwan-Williams.pdf
And here is a Video from his presentation at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge in 2017, it lasts about 56 minutes
A BIG thank you to Iwan for his time and very interesting presentation, also thanks to Eddie Mace for arranging the evening.
Phil Horsley then presented the KVG & TR Register News, he also made mention of KVG member Graham Robertshaw, who took on a challenge to raise £500 for the Motor Neurone Disease Association by cycling from London to Brighton, after practicing on local canal towpaths, Graham did find hills a bit of a strain, but he did it, and even better, he raised £1,475 via his Just Giving page for the charity, WELL DONE Graham!, if you weren't able to gt along, please download it here: 10.-Club-night-News-Events-03-10-18.pdf
Our next event are:
- Thatcham Classic
- Wheels Vintage Vehicles, Cookham Dean
- Eat & Drive (please let Phil Horsley if you're going so numbers can be finalised)
Hope to see you there!