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Welcome to the Observatory!

This site is intended for anyone interested in astronomy, and particularly anyone who would like to be a member of the Bootham School Astronomy Society. This membership is available to all members of the Bootham community, and students from other York schools who have attended the ISSP course on astronomy at Bootham. If you choose to subscribe by email, you will receive an email of any new post within about twenty four hours. There will also be twitter updates before an observatory session, and you are recommended to follow me on twitter using the button on the right of this screen.

Sunday 4 March 2012

Eye witness account of last night's meteorite!

Large Meteorite Seen Over Bootham School
Late on the evening of Saturday 3rd March, a meteorite could be seen making its way across the skies of Northern England. We were surprised and fortunate to catch sight of this phenomenon as we returned to the Fox boarding house after an evening activity in the Sports Hall.
It was like seeing a shooting star, but in slow-motion, in full-colour, and so up-close it felt almost within reach. You could say the head of the meteorite was the size of a football, with a blazing tail of orange and white fire. But perhaps it looked more like a Year-7 student, wearing some kind of jet-boots, like the hero in a sci-fi animation, coolly cruising across the night sky.
In any case, standing on the Fox quad, we saw the meteorite rise over one of the Maths classrooms and travel across Fox House, only to dive behind the Language department and disappear from sight. We almost expected a huge explosion upon impact somewhere on the other side of the river Ouse, but the meteorite continued on its way and is said to have been seen as far south as Devon.   
A sighting like this is very rare, perhaps once-in-lifetime. It was certainly strange and startling enough to leave us (two almost-adults) feeling boyishly exhilarated afterwards.

Daniel Gustafsson & Luke Highstead, Resident Graduates      

First session of this year's ISSP

It was very nice to meet all the young people who attended yesterday's meeting of the ISSP, and I was delighted to see so much enthusiasm shown by so many. We covered a lot of ground on the general theme of stars, but in summary yesterday's topics included;
  • the constellations and how they change through the seasons,
  • stellar spectral classes, and what the colours of stars can tell us,
  • how to see sunspots using telescope projection,
  • using transits to measure what time it is,
  • and the stellar magnitude scale.
Here are just a few pictures from the session, and I'm sorry that not everyone is shown but I hope they help to remind you of what you did!







see you next week for the solar system, life in the universe and how we're going to find it!