A group of students from Astronomy Club went to Sandilands last week after school with Mr Flanagan and Mr Bright from the Physics Department for a practical Astronomy session.
They were joined by Mr Roberts from the Croydon Astronomical Society who spoke to the students about how telescopes work and how they have evolved over the past few centuries.
Despite cloudy weather, the group were able to see Jupiter and its moons using the school’s three Dobsonian reflectors. The Dobsonian telescope design is a popular Newtonian reflector which set a paradigm shift in amateur astronomy when it was first made popular back in the 1960s by American telescope maker, John Dobson. It offers good optical quality, is portable and is wonderful for amateur astronomers like our students.
Student Anay was down at Sandilands and said, “It was really cool to be able to see Jupiter’s moons with my own eyes, not just through pictures!”
Trinity’s Astronomy Club is a co-curricular club which meets every Wednesday after school for theory sessions and to undertake practical observations whenever the weather allows. In previous observations, the group have seen the Orion Nebula (situated in the Milky Way), binary star systems, the open star cluster Pleiades and also Saturn’s rings.
Per Sandilands ad astra!
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