Speaker profile

The Green Flash or Green Ray is a fleeting and beautiful phenomenon which has inspired the imagination of story-tellers from ancient Egypt to the present day. Meet the nerdish Aristobulos, hero of Jules Verne's "Le Rayon Vert", and David Abden, roguish hero of Winston Graham's "The Green Flash", as they try to explain the mysteries of the setting sun. "... this ray has the virtue of making him who has seen it impossible to be deceived in matters of sentiment; at its appearence all deceit and falsehood are done away, and he who has been fortunate enough once to behold it is enabled to see closely into his own heart and read the thoughts of others..." (Jules Verne)

A survey of "things to see around the shadow of the head" and the extra-ordinary legends they have provoked - featuring Benvenuto Cellini, Ben Nevis, the Spectre of the Brocken, Henry Miller, Goethe, Coleridge and suicidal Buddhists... With an introduction to "Astronomy from Economy Class"

A fresh look at a familiar sight, which generations have sought to interpret according to their own beliefs. Will the world end if the rainbow does not appear? Is there a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? And what strange fate will befall you should you pass beneath the rainbow? Leading to the modern day theory of the bow; from Descartes, Halley and Newton to quantum physics, lasers and infra-red rainbows.

In a digital age, there is something unexpectedly appealing about the projected image. The camera obscura, literally a dark chamber, allows you to view the outside world with clarity - and in secrecy! Have you ever visited one? Or built your own? The camera obscura has a long history. Aristotle knew about pinhole projection from the observation of solar eclipses. De la Porta staged projected entertainments during the sixteenth century. Artists used portable camera obscuras to get their perspective right; soldiers took them to the trenches to observe in safety. The golden age of the camera obscura was the nineteenth century, when every sea-side resort had one. But in recent years the camera obscura has undergone a renaissance. The talk concludes with a guide to where to find these fascinating instruments.

Astronomy is an aesthetic and exhilarating science, but can it address everyday problems? Like my ever-expanding waistline, for example. Diet books are no good - they tell you to undertake tedious exercise regimes, forego all the foodstuffs you hold dear. Perhaps a scientific analysis of the problem can help. It turns out that there are some interesting ways to lose weight, which involve neither effort nor macrobiotics. Where on the Earth's surface do you weigh least? And most? Where in the solar system? Where in the universe? How do you achieve weightlessness, and is weightlessness all it's cracked up to be? A whimsical look at the physics of weight, featuring illustrations by Chris Saunderson.

An offbeat look at Newton's theory of gravity - featuring hollow Earths, counter-Earths Trojan asteroids, Kirkwood gaps, Lagrangian nodes, the three-body problem, and those mysterious beasts rumoured to haunt Surrey playing fields and Bodmin Moor. Already delivered on two continents!

On Sunday 24th November, 1639, Jeremiah Horrocks observed a Transit of the planet Venus across the face of the Sun, from Much Hoole, a village south of Preston, Lancashire, England. Horrocks and his friend William Crabtree, observing from Salford, Lancashire, were the only people to see the first ever observed Transit of Venus. Horrocks had successfully predicted an event that nobody else knew was going to happen. To see the Transit, Horrocks had to overcome the vagaries of Lancastrian weather; whilst giving due to attention to “greater things, which it was certainly not proper to neglect for these subordinate pursuits”, at St Michael’s church, Much Hoole. I have a few things in common with Jeremiah Horrocks. We’re both astronomers; we both grew up in Lancashire; we both have (had) relatives in Rhode Island, America. We both attended Emmanuel College in Cambridge (as did a surprising number of other historical characters, some of whom knew Jeremiah). This lecture is a guided tour through Jeremiah Horrocks’s brief, extraordinary life.

Jeremiah Horrocks was the first man to predict and then observe a Transit of Venus, in November 1639. It’s well known that he contacted two other people, to ask them to look out for the Transit. Horrocks’s brother, Jonas, was unable to see the spectacle from Toxteth, Lancashire, because of cloud. William Crabtree, of Broughton, Manchester, had more luck, and was able to corroborate Horrocks’s observations from Much Hoole, Lancashire. It is much less well known that Jeremiah Horrocks attempted to warn a third astronomer – Samuel Foster, who had been Professor of Astronomy at Gresham College, London . When I started to research the life of Foster I found out that he was part of a group of pioneering astronomers active in the Midlands of England in the years around the English Civil War. This talk is about Samuel Foster and his fellow observers – John Twysden, John Palmer and Walter Foster. The story leads on to the mysterious figure of Nathaniel Nye, “mathematitian, astronomer, and master gunner of the city of Worcester”.

Jeremiah Horrocks, the first person to predict and then see a transit of Venus, also wrote several papers on other aspects of astronomy. In one of his papers he wrote about a method - known since antiquity - of calculating longitude by timing lunar eclipses at two separate locations. One of his observers, un-named, was located in "Aquedniek" in New England. Who might it have been? Horrocks biographers have suggested candidates. In this talk I present a new candidate for Horrocks's New England correspondent. I also tell the extraordinary story of the colonisation of Aquidneck, now part of Rhode Island, by a fanatical sect led by the formidable Anne Hutchinson. In the first half of the seventeenth century, followers of Puritan persuasion were persecuted for their "back to basics" beliefs. Some Puritans, like Jeremiah Horrocks, chose to lead their lives quietly in England, but many others emigrated to the colonies of the New World, where they practised their faith in the frontier lands of the American colonies. A tale of scientific observation in the most unlikely of locations.

On February 18th 1737 there was an eclipse of the Sun visible from Warwickshire. It was one of an extraordinary series of British eclipses which occurred in the eighteenth century, and inspired a generation of astronomers and cartographers to produce ever-more elaborate charts and maps of the eclipse tracks. Henry Beighton, surveyor, engineer, draftsman and mathematician, drew one such chart to illustrate the 1737 eclipse. I found this chart in the papers of Roger Newdigate, a young aristocrat who lived in Arbury Hall, Nuneaton. I use the story of these two fascinating historical figures, and the map that connects them, to trace the flowering of mathematical talent in the wake of Newton, Halley and others. In the case of Beighton and Newdigate, these talents played a direct part in bringing the industrial revolution to Warwickshire.

Let me tell you about some friends of mine, and a project seven years in the making. Tom McLeish, professor of Natural Philosophy at York University, is an old friend of mine. In August 2017 he was at a conference in Indiana and took time out to see the solar eclipse from Crofton, Kentucky. Tom is a great fan of cross-cultural studies, and resolved to run a project to examine solar eclipses from as many perspectives as possible. He brought on board Henrike Lange, associate professor of Italian Renaissance Architecture and Art at UC Berkeley, as a co-editor. They assembled a team - historians, art historians, a musicologist, meteorologist, solar physicist, Dante expert, animal behaviour expert and theologian. They also needed an eclipse chasing nerd. For some reason Tom thought of me... This is the story of the Eclipse and Revelation project, and how I became involved in the production of the finished work, ahead of the North American eclipse of April 08 2024; "Eclipse and Revelation" was published in February 2024 by OUP.

No, not the political farce by Dario Fo... On February 15th 1894, a young Frenchman called Martial Bourdin made his way to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and detonated a home-made bomb. His story was headline news at the time, and subsequently inspired Joseph Conrad's novel, "The Secret Agent", which has been filmed twice, and has itself been cited as a source for modern day terrorists. This talk weaves Bourdin's story into the history of the RGO. In its heyday, the Greenwich Observatory was a world class research observatory, and the location of the world's prime meridian. Why did it become the site of England's first ever international terrorist attack?

From 1817 to 1847 the Rector of South Kilworth, South Leicestershire, was the Reverend William Pearson. He was also the co-founder of the Royal Astronomical Society, and his portrait (above) hangs in the council room of the RAS. From his observatories in the village, Pearson carried out decades of observational astronomy, which were published in "Practical Astronomy", the leading astronomical textbook of the early nineteenth century. This talk tells the story of a neglected but significant figure in Victorian astronomy.

The story of two Northamptonshire Astronomers. John Twysden, a doctor, fled to Easton Maudit during the Civil War. John Palmer was the rector of Ecton, a small village to the east of Northampton. The two astronomers carried out a series of observations from Northamptonshire during the mid-seventeenth century, including the great comet of 1652, and early observations of Mira. Featuring Benjamin Franklin's grandfather and King Charles's toothpick.

This is the story of two men, one from the West Country, the other from County Durham, who drew a line across the North American continent. Their names were Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, and they were astronomers. Mason and Dixon had already taken part in one astronomical expedition, to observe the 1761 Transit of Venus, and went on to take part in several other great scientific projects of the eighteenth century - measuring the shape of the Earth and determining the strength of gravity. The line they gave their name to, the Mason-Dixon line separating Pennsylvania and Maryland, has become a synonym for the fault lines which have split America, from the Civil War to the present-day, and has inspired many cultural works; I reference Mark Knopfler and Thomas Pynchon among others.

On a snowy November day in 2014, I visited the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. Yerkes was one of the great 19th-century observatories. It is still the home of the world's largest refracting telescope. The buildings, built by the University of Chicago and financed by Charles Tyson Yerkes and the Rockefeller Foundation, are architecturally fascinating. This is the story of the observatory and the extraordinary people who worked there - George Ellery Hale, Edwin Hubble, Edward Emerson Barnard, Otto Struve, Gerard Kuiper, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Carl Sagan and many others.

On March 20th 2015 a total eclipse of the Sun swept across the North Atlantic. The only places where a total eclipse could be seen from land were the Faroe Islands (where it was largely clouded out) and the territory of Svalbard in the High Arctic. I went to Longyearbyen on Svalbard, and then Tromso in northern Norway, with the Totally Insane Travel Society, a bunch of madcap and very talented imagers. This is the story of our arctic eclipse, a stunning sight in cloudless skies. And polar bears, shadow bands, frostbite, engima machines, fata morgana, reindeer pizza and pink bottoms.

What has Mata Hari got to do with astronomy? The exotic dancer, courtesan and spy, shot by firing squad in October 1917, lived in Java in the Dutch East Indies before finding fame on the Parisian stage, and pretended to be a Javanese princess, though in reality she was born Margarete Zolle in the Netherlands. For her stage name, she took the Malay name for the Sun, literally "eye of the day". Present day Indonesian uses the same phrase, and so on March 9th 2016 we had a Gerhane Matahari, a total eclipse of the Sun, which crossed the Indonesian archipelago. I saw the eclipse from Tidore, one of the "spice islands" in the Moluccas. This talk tells the story of our trip to the beautiful, friendly and fascinating islands of Sulawesi, Ternate and Tidore.

The Great American Eclipse crossed the United States from coast to coast on August 21st 2017. I saw it from the confluence of the Snake River and Burnt River on the Oregon / Idaho border; a beautiful eclipse in a cloudless sky. My talk tells the story of my trip through north-west America, across Mount Rainier and the Cascades to the wild-west town of Pendleton Oregon, the laid-back city of Portland, and Olympic National Park.

In January 2018 I joined my friends from the Totally Insane Travel Society on a cruise round the top of Norway. Lapland like to market themselves as the "Land of the Midnight Sun", but this doesn't pan out so well in January. So is it the "Land of the Mid-Day Dark" in winter? Well no, not really. Round mid-day, the sky is dusk-like, often with a gorgeous pink glow to the sky. After a day in Tromso, we joined the Hurtigruten ship MS Trollfjord, on its cruise round the crinkly bits at the top of Norway. We visited North Cape, Kirkenes and the Russian border, and Hammerfest. Best of all, we had some wonderful auroral displays.

On July 2nd 2019, I was in Bellavista, San Juan province, Argentina, to witness the latest total solar eclipse. We saw it from a llama farm, with a cloudless sky and a backdrop of the Andes. The llamas were unimpressed. Also featuring travels around South America - Buenos Aires, Santiago and Vina del Mar.

On December 14th 2020, the path of a total eclipse crossed the northern part of Patagonia (Chile and Argentina). The previous year I had seen a beautiful eclipse from northern Argentina, and I was looking forward to another visit to South America. Of course, events got in the way. The coronavirus pandemic shut down travel across the world. Argentina and Chile closed their borders to foreigners. Tour companies cancelled trips, and I began to resign myself to missing this eclipse. However ... against the odds, a narrow window of opportunity began to inch open. Astro-Trails and Eurotur were able to negotiate permits for small groups of eclipse chasers to enter Argentina, travelling in a bubble like a sports team. I was one of their guest astronomers. We made it to Argentina, safely. We made it back, safely. And in between we saw a stunning eclipse from an estancia (horse ranch) in Neuquen Province, northern Patagonia.

The story of an eminent Victorian astronomer - the co-discoverer of helium, founder of the journal Nature, and pioneer of archaeo-astronomy. A glimpse at the extraordinary world of Victorian eclipse chasers - shipwrecks, sieges and escapes by hot-air balloon. And the story of Lockyer's own observatory in Sidmouth, open to this day

This talk tells the life story of Reverend George Fisher (1794-1873), a little-known but accomplished figure from the 19th century. Although from a wealthy family, the early death of Fisher's father meant that he started work at an early age in the Westminster Fire Company. His mathematical skills and enthusiasm brough him to the attention of members of the Royal Society, and he became an undergraduate at St Catherine's College, Cambridge. His undergraduate career was interrupted by a year on a naval expedition to try to find a path across the Arctic Ocean north of Spitzbergen, After graduation he became a naval chaplain who served as astronomer on Captain William Parry's 1821-3 expedition to find the north-west passage out of Hudson's Bay, Canada. Parry (a notable figure n astronomy in his own right) published a fascinating journal of the expedition which acknowledged Fisher's many accomplishments. After his naval career finished, he became headmaster of the Naval College School, Greenwich, where he built an observatory. He retired to my home town in Midlands, which is how I came to find out about him

The British Astronomical Association was founded in 1890. Right from the start, the membership included talented lady astronomers. In part this was because the Royal Astronomical Society did not admit women at this time. This talk tells the stories of many of the lady pioneers of the BAA. Agnes Clerke, astronomical historian; Annie Maunder, solar astronomer and first editor of the BAA Journal; Margaret, Lady Huggins, spectroscopist; Elizabeth Brown, solar pioneer; Fiametta Wilson and Grace Cook, meteor observers; Mary Blagg, variable star expert. And Mary Acworth Evershed, my predecessor as first director of the BAA's historical section.

Dark Matter. Is it Dark? Does it Matter? A while ago I was asked to give a talk on dark matter. I thought, "I don't know anything about dark matter". And then I realised, neither does anyone else! How did we get to the point where we think that 80% of all the matter in the universe is of a form completely unknown to us? I'm interested in how the idea of dark matter developed - the concept goes back a surprisingly long way. Dark matter solves a number of problems in diverse fields, but has stubbornly refused to identify itself. Are we thinking about the problems in the wrong way? Might we be on the edge of a revolution in the way we think about the universe? It's happened before... And the answers... Is it Dark? NO (it's Invisible) Does it Matter? YES

The pioneer explorers of the solar system are not humans, but robotic explorers. How do they differ from the robots of popular culture? In this talk I trace the history of robots in fiction, from Kare Capek's Universal Robots to Hollywood blockbusters, and contrast it with the ever-increasing capabilities of robotic space probes.