Many thanks to everyone who made it up to Abriachan Forest for our Burns stargazing event on Saturday. Big thanks to Jim for his excellent Haggis address and the Abriachan team for the delicious Burns supper fare.

Skies were a little patchy but we did see good naked eye views towards the south and the main focus of the evening talk – the mighty Orion constellation.

After observing Orion we headed inside to explore some of the amazing deep sky objects hidden within this giant of the night sky, like the beautiful Horsehead and Flame nebulae, part of the enormous star forming Orion Molecular Cloud Complex.

This region contains areas of dark, emissive and reflection nebulosity, with hot young stars blasting intense radiation into the hydrogen clouds producing the distinctive red areas due to ionisation.

At this scale the extent of our solar system (out to Neptune) would be one 10,000th of the width of the picture you see below on the right – less than a single pixel element within the image!

Ticket links will go up very shortly for our February and March guest speaker Star Stories events with Martin Hendry and Catherine Heymans. I hope to see you all there.