The speaker we had booked was unable to do a suitable talk for us so we had to look for an alternative.

Our Hon President, Bob Forrest, kindly agreed with just two days notice to step into the breach and talk about the Caldwell objects; we owe Bob a big vote of thanks for that.

For those that don't know, the Caldwell objects were listed by Patrick Moore and the name Caldwell comes from his name, which in full is: Patrick Caldwell-Moore. The idea of the list is to catalogue objects of great interest to amateur astronomers but which don't appear in the Messier catalogue for the simple reason that they either couldn't be seen from France or they could not possibly be mistaken for a comet. The Caldwell list was the subject of the 'Sky at Night' the previous Sunday, which is what prompted Bob to talk about them.

Anyway, in spite of the very short notice, we had a most comprehensive tour of the most interesting objects in the list. Bob showed slides of 34 of them from those visible only in the North to those visible only from the South and back again, including planetary nebulae, globular clusters, open clusters and galaxies. A lot of the interest of the talk, for me, was the comparative images shown; photos or CCD images of the same object taken, in many cases, from the University of Hertfordshire's observatory complex at Bayfordbury, with the Anglo Australian Telescope (AAT) and with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). I find it interesting, and exciting, that images taken with amateur sized instruments, 6 inch refractor, 12 inch SCT and looking into the heavily light polluted skies above Bayfordbury can be quite as fascinating as the stunning images from the AAT and HST. To see the coma on the wide angle photos and the photon noise on the CCD images is to me more exciting than the perfect and highly doctored images from the large instruments. Though as a caveat to that I must say some of the big telescope images, particularly of galaxies can only be described as awe-inspiring!

Incidentally, on the first point, two of the pictures that Patrick Moore showed, C1, the open cluster in Cepheus and C55, the Saturn nebula were acknowledged by him to have been provided by Bob at Bayfordbury.

The slides that Bob showed and his obvious enthusiasm will, I hope, encourage more of our members to get out there and look for some of the Caldwell objects and 'take some pictures'.

- [Reviewer]