Monday 6pm Feb 14 1. 3 BILLION DOLLAR MAN MEETS PAT KENNY Hopefully you managed to hear Pat Kenny interview tonight's speaker, Prof Carl Murray on Radio 1 this morning. Prof Murray is on the team that takes all the pictures of Saturn we are hoping to see tonight from the 3 billion dollar Cassini-Huygens mission. If not you can listen to it online now at: http://www.rte.ie/rams/radio/latest/Mon/rte-todaywithpatkenny.smil The interview starts 1hour 43min 14seconds in (use the "seek" option to go direct to it) He'll also be on tonight's 9 o'clock TV news. Since we have now booked such a huge hall there are still plenty of places left so feel free to show up before 8pm and take a seat for the latest pictures from Saturn and Titan! 2. IRISH PULSAR DISCOVER SPEAKING IN CORK, BELFAST, DUBLIN Eilish McLoughlin from D.C.U. sends us this notice of an excellent lecture which I had the pleasure of attending when it was held in Armagh last year. As well as the D.C.U. event Prof Bell-Burnell is speaking in Cork (Feb. 15) and Belfast (Feb. 16). Further details at http://ireland.iop.org/program.html : The Institute of Physics in Ireland would like to invite you to attend one of the lectures given by Professor Jocelyn Bell-Burnell (Open University, Milton-Keynes, UK) Prof. Bell-Burnell is considered the greatest female physicist from Ireland, having been born and bred in Belfast. She is one of only a handful of female professors of Physics in the UK. As a PhD student she made a dramatic discovery of regular signal coming from space. Initially she jokingly labelled this signal coming as LGM for Little Green Men which caught the media’s attention at the time. It was later found that this signal was coming from a “pulsar” which is a rapidly rotating neutron star. The Nobel prize in physics for this discovery was awarded in 1974, but controversially Jocelyn did not share in the prize with the credit going to her research supervisor. She was awarded a CBE in 1999 and an honorary DSc from Queen’s University Belfast in 2002 for services to astronomy and raising the profile of women in science. "Tick, Tick, Tick Pulsating Star, How We Wonder What You Are" Thursday 17 February 4.00 pm Dublin City University Venue: XG22 Admission charge: None. And Also: Tuesday 15 February, 7.30 pm University College Cork: Venue: Boole Lecture Theatre 4. Target audience: Children ages 11 and up, general public. Admission charge: None. Local organiser: Denise Gabuzda, tel. 021 - 490 2003 Wednesday 16 February, 4.00 pm Queen's University Belfast Thursday 17 February, 4.00 pm Dublin City University Committee Contact: Jason Greenwood, tel. 044 - 28 - 9097 3935 3. SUNSPOTS AND NOVA Brigid Murphy from Balbriggan, Co. Dublin emailed over the weekend to alert us to the fact that two large groups of sunspots have just appeared. NEVER LOOK DIRECTLY AT THE SUN WITH THE NAKED-EYE OR ANY OPTICAL AID. Use AstroSolar filter (available from our Shop) for safe viewing, and monitor these spots over the next week or two. Watch out for displays of the aurora at night too. My apologies in the last email for saying the new nova in Cygnus was found by S. Nakano. It was in fact discovered by Japanese astronomer Hideo Nishimura! I saw the nova last night in an 8-inch telescope and it was roughly magnitude 9.9 so it does not appear to have brightened. My simple finder chart is at http://www.astronomy.ie/NovaCyg05.gif and the AAVSO close-up chart is at http://www.aavso.org/cgi-bin/shrinkwrap.pl?path=/charts/CYG/N_CYG_05/NCYG05-... Hoping to see you at tonight's lecture and wishing you clear skies, David Moore. Chairman, Astronomy Ireland Tel: (01) 847 0777 Visit www.astronomy.ie Please support our club, magazine, and the ASTRONOMY SHOP at Unit 75, Butterly Business Park, Kilmore Road, Artane, Dublin 5. IRELAND'S BIGGEST TELESCOPE SHOP