Friday Meetings 2025/26
December 12th, 2025. Christmas Quiz and Social Evening
January 9th, 2026. Graham Young, DAS – The Life and Times of Thomas Henderson
Thomas Henderson was born in Dundee, and went on to become Scotland’s first Astronomer Royal, with a number of interesting scientific achievements along the way.
January 23rd, 2026. Scott Acton, STFC, ROE – Reflections on the Webb Telescope and Cycling the World
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a segmented deployable telescope, currently operating ~1 million miles from Earth, at the second Lagrangian point. Since the first observations were released in the summer of 2022, Webb has continued to produce visually stunning images. The analysis of these images is changing humanity’s understanding of the Universe; rewriting textbooks. Since Webb is a deployable segmented telescope, it had to be aligned after launch, via a “Wavefront Sensing and Controls” (WFSC) process heavily rooted in Image Analysis. Starting with positioning uncertainties on the order of a few millimetres, the alignment process correctly positioned Webb’s optics to within a handful of nanometres.
Scott will present an overview of the Webb Telescope and its imagery obtained during the past few years and discuss the analysis techniques that enabled it to be aligned after launch. He will also share some of his adventures encountered while cycling around the world to promote the telescope.
February 13th, 2026. Hong-Gang Yang, Edinburgh University – Galaxy Assembly Bias and Its Role in Cosmology
Over the past few decades, our picture of the Universe has converged on the so-called ΛCDM model—where Λ represents a constant dark energy and CDM stands for cold dark matter. This model has been remarkably successful in explaining a wide range of observations, from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to the large-scale distribution of galaxies. Yet, important puzzles remain. For example, the value of the Hubble constant inferred from the CMB does not agree with the one measured from nearby galaxies, and recent results from the DESI Collaboration even suggest that dark energy may not be constant but evolving over time. These tensions remind us that our current model, while powerful, is not the final word on cosmology.
February 27th, 2026. Ryan MacDonald, St Andrews – Exoplanets and the Search for Alien Life
Astronomers have now discovered over 6,000 planets orbiting other stars. Ranging from inferno gas giants with sapphire clouds to temperate rocky planets in the habitable zone, our galaxy is teeming with a diverse collection of strange and exotic worlds. With the James Webb Space Telescope, it is now possible, for the first time, to search for air on rocky planets around other stars and even, potentially, to find signs of life.
March 13th, 2026. Nisha Gewal, Edinburgh University - Subject to be arranged.
March 20th, 2026 AGM members only
