SOCIETY IN FOCUS
The last day that members of the Flamsteed Astronomy Society met together for a main monthly lecture was on 9 March 2020 – though we didn’t know it at the time. We had an inkling that travel restrictions might make it difficult for guest speakers to travel to our home at the Royal Observatory Greenwich (ROG), so we explained to our members that night that we were looking at the possibility of moving talks online.
Two weeks later, the UK was in lockdown, but we had already trialled Zoom with our members, who welcomed the opportunity to keep our talks going. Silver linings in this COVID-19 cloud are few and far between, but we found we could accommodate more of our members at an online event than we could squeeze into our National Maritime Museum lecture theatre. The internet enabled us to bring speakers ‘to Greenwich’ who might not have been able to travel so far, even in ‘normal’ times. We’ve welcomed a range of lecturers – from Prof Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Prof Catherine Heymans, to science writers Dallas Campbell and Jo Marchant, while our ‘history of astronomy’ programme didn’t skip a beat.
Although our usual observing sessions have been cancelled, as have various visits, we have run astrophotography workshops online and a three-part ‘Introduction to astronomy’ series.
But, as of the time of writing, we are all eagerly awaiting a return to ‘real world’ events and being a more ‘social’ society. It will be good to be back in our usual space. Andy Sawers, former Chair of the Flamsteed Astronomy Society, 2016-21 www.flamsteed.info www.vimeo.com/flamsteedas