Membership fees for 2025/26 are now due £20 (£15 concessionary) these can be paid in person at the next meeting or by PayPal (friends & family) Preston.astro@gmail.com

Meetings

Next Meeting Thursday 9th October 2025

David Clarke gained his PhD at the University of Manchester, UK, and has worked at Institutions and Observatories around the world.  In his early career, he worked on Zodiacal Light observations from a site at 18500 ft in the Bolivian Andes, and later was involved with ‘Skylab’ and ‘Pioneer 10’ missions.  His main theme researches focused on optical polarimetric instrumentation for investigating scattering processes within stellar atmospheres, the interstellar medium,and the Earth’s atmosphere.  Widely experienced as a Practical and Observational Astronomer, he has published over 130 Papers and five Books, one⸺an undergraduate text⸺now in 4^th edition.  As an Educator, he served as the UK’s IAU representative and on the RAS Education Committee.  He has organised support meetings for school teachers and was key in setting up the UK’s Association for Astronomy Education, being its first Editor and Printing its magazine, ‘Gnomon’.  Now holding an Honorary Research Fellowship at Glasgow University, following his retirement as Observatory Director, he continues with involvements in Public Outreach.

This evening’s talk on ‘The Pleiades’ will cover his own telescope observations, now superseded by the 24/7 data from the Kepler 2 [K2] Mission.  On the way, it will cover aspects of this beautiful open cluster with the general arts including painting poetry and music.