The Chesterfield Barnett Observatory
Our observatory is open every Friday from 8pm onwards until the last person leaves. We always give visitors a warm welcome so if you'd like to join us, please feel free to do so. You don't need to book your visit, just pop over to see us and we'll show you around and make sure you get the opportunity to do some stargazing too if the weather is with us. We rely on the generosity of the local community to keep the observatory open so please can you place a small donation of £2 in out visitors' pot when you visit.
If you'd like to learn more about the observatory, click on the menu item 'Our Observatory' at the top of this page.
We very much hope that you will come and visit us on a Friday evening when we will make sure you have an astronomically good time 🙂
Address : Hastings Close, Newbold, Chesterfield, S41 8RH
Tel: 0751 751 0083
Please go to the bottom of this page for a map showing the location of the observatory
Talk on the 16th September
Unfortunately the talk entitled 'Is there life out there?' due this Friday at the observatory has been cancelled. Instead there will be a talk introducing newcomers to atronomy. The talk will start at approximately 8.15 and should last around one hour.
We apologise for the change but hope you will attend and enjoy the alternative talk.
Gravitational Waves Talk by Ed Daw
Friday the 5th of August saw Ed Daw of Sheffield University give us a talk on the FIRST DIRECT DETECTIONS OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVES BY LIGO. (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory)
 He has been working on the project for 19 years and told us of the difficulties of building the detector. Even getting it straight on the curved surface of the Earth was a problem. They even had to compensate for the pull of the Moon's gravity!
He made the story funny and even made the maths humorous. They even had to contend with crocodiles in the water filled channels which run down the sides of the concrete tubes housing the detector, which can be seen in the above image.
When the LIGO experiment, conceived in 1972 by Rai Weiss at MIT, had successfully detected gravitational waves from binary black hole collisions approximately 100 million light years away, it was met with apprehension.  The first wave came through on the 14th September 2015.  They spent weeks checking whether it was really the gravitational wave or a misinterpretation of the data. Ed said the hardest part was not being able to say anything until the official announcement was made in February of this year.
The second wave to come through again took everybody by surprise. It was on Boxing Day and at the time Ed was caving and didn't know until he surfaced and read his emails later. This time they knew what they were looking for.
Ed is obviously very enthusiastic about his work and this shone through in his talk. He enjoyed the questions and was surrounded after the talk by members wanting to know more. He was very complimentary about our telescope calling it "some feat of engineering".
You can learn more about LIGO at this website:
Our thanks to Ed for giving such an entertaining talk about this amazing project.
Ed Daw at the Chesterfield Observatory
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