Summer Sale Membership DVD Shop 1. Watch Eclipse of the Sun Online While not visible from Ireland, people in Australia and the South Pacific will get to see a Solar Eclipse later on. However, people in Ireland and elsewhere can watch the eclipse live from 10pm Irish time via a live broadcast from the Coca-Cola Space Science Center in Australia. You can watch the broadcast HERE. QUIRKY FACT: The next total eclipse of the Sun visible from Ireland is not until the afternoon of Saturday, September 23rd in 2090. But even then it is total only from the extreme southwest of Ireland. The rest of the country will have to wait until just after sunrise on the morning of Monday, May 5th, 2600! We'll be organising eclipse trips out of Ireland before then, though, just like our highly successful trips to Bulgaria in 1999 and Turkey in 2006! 2. Public Lecture: The Billion Euro Telescope Astronomy Ireland welcomes an international speaker for its May Public Lecture about a billion euro telescope, the ALMA Project in Chile! Dr John Richer from the University of Cambridge is the UK Project Scientist for ALMA, and he will explain in this lecture how the facility will allow astronomers to peer deep inside star-forming regions of galaxies, otherwise invisible to telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope. It will enable transformational research into the physics of the cold Universe, probe the first stars and galaxies, and directly image the formation of planets. ALMA - short for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array - is an extremely important project in science and when completed it can effectively configure its 50 individual telescopes to act as a single large telescope 16km across! It is the biggest and most expensive ground-based astronomical project being built at over a billion euro already. The lecture will take place in Trinity College Dublin next Monday, May 13th, at 8pm. To book tickets or to order DVDs, please click HERE or call (01) 890 11 11. Astronomy Ireland The world's most popular astronomy club www.astronomy.ie ( subscribe / unsubscribe )