AGM & Member's presentation night, 6:30pm, Wednesday 1 Oct.

Held on-line via Zoom.

The Sydney City Skywatchers Annual General Meeting is a fun on-line evening where we nominate the committee and roles and reflect on the past year. Your attendance at this meeting is very important and greatly appreciated as we need a quorum to conduct the AGM. This is the time to come along and have your say on how the society is being run. Perhaps there are ways we can improve our service to you. Please let us know what you think. Remember, SCS is here for the members.

It's also an opportunity for members to present short talks about topics that they are interested or involved in. We encourage all members to attend and to nominate for the committee.

SCS AGM 2025 Notice.pdf

Download PDF • 369KB

SCS Nomination Form.pdf

Download PDF • 104KB

PRESENTATIONS

Reuben Cox-Doherty - Exoplanets

Currently over 5,900 planets have been identified in other solar systems, and almost another thousand candidates are being assessed. There are many different methods for identifying these planets and determining which ones are in the habital zone. I will examine some of these in this fascinating area of discovery.

Exoplanet parade image courtesy NASA.

Merrill Findlay - Introducing inlandastrotrail.com 

Dr Merrill Findlay will introduce her collaborative mega-project, The Inland Astro-Trail (IAT), a website and road trip covering 65,000+ years of astronomical heritage, 4.8 billion years of planetary evolution, and 13.8 billion years of celestial creation, one astro-site at a time. Merrill will talk about this project and the values embodied in it, and invite Sydney Skywatchers to become co-creators, as part of the emerging IAT community.  

Dirk Goes - Common Envelope Evolution: How interacting binary star systems evolve.

As amateur astronomers we enjoy viewing binary or double stars through our telescopes.  Some of these will evolve into extreme systems such as X-Ray binaries or Type-IA supernovae.  What is the astrophysical process by which this occurs? 

Rob Luxford - Video: The Sun

The Sun video presents facts and figures about the sun, covering a broad range of topics. The six and a half minute video, incorporates video footage from NASA as well as pictures and a narrative from experts in the field.

Jonni Nicolaou - Hollywood vs The Universe 

How well do our favourite cinematic masterpieces hold up to real-world physics. I will feature a handful of examples and you get to rate them from most accurate to least. 

Wayne Orchiston - Five Colourful Trans-Tasman Astronomy Posters

For the past decade, and especially post-COVID and since the founding of the Historical Section in 2022, I've been displaying colourful A1-size posters at the annual Conferences of the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand. Obviously all have to do with NZ astronomy, but some are on trans-Tasman topics. In my talk I will show five posters with Sydney-Windsor links. Three relate to John Tebbutt (his 1861 and 1881 Great Comets, and his 8-inch Grubb telescope) and the others are about an ex-Sydney Observatory Alvan Clark telescope, and the accomplished astronomy populariser, Henry Severn.

(Above) A chromolithograph of a painting by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1827—1895) of the Great Comet of 1881 in Orchiston, D. Wayne (2016). John Tebbutt: Rebuilding and Strengthening the Foundations of Australian Astronomy (1st ed. 2018). Springer, Cham.

Details: This presentation will be on-line by Zoom. Members will be emailed the Zoom link. If you are not a member and want to attend this meeting please email our secretary on: sydneycityskywatchers@gmail.com.

Please log-in by 6:25pm. The AGM will start at 6:30pm and the short presentations will commence at approximately 7:15pm.