LAST March Monthly Meeting

Yesterday, we had a great time at LAST monthly meeting at the observatory. As usual i started of by introducing Zeds Astronomical Observatory and what we did last month here. Our photometric submissions were 42 in total, although it was quite a cloudy and rainy month.

Rabeea Rasheed, who is a second year student of Lahore College for Women University, gave a talk on Astrobiology which was wonderfully explained. She had definitely done her homework there!

Good to see new faces in the meeting! Here are some of the pictures i took.

Lecture by Dr Salman Hameed

This lecture was given in at the end of December 2014 here at Zeds Astronomical Observatory. We had a good gathering in the cold evening. The lecture (in Urdu) was about the efforts we humans have done to know about the Universe and how it has shaped our understanding of who we are. I am sure you would all enjoy it.

GAM2014 Public Session

'Lahore Astronomical Society' arranged a public observing session for 'Global Astronomy Month 2014' in Bagh e Jinnah/Lawrence Garden, Lahore on 12 April, 2014.

Members of 'Lahore Astronomical Society' brought up their handy telescopes. People in the park came to us after seeing some nerdy folks with strange equipment. We were honored to have with us Khalid Marwat, who is a veteran amateur astronomer in Pakistan, known by almost everyone under the stars. He explained in detail some very basic and important concepts of observing the night sky to the beginners there. LAST is thankful for his presence with us that day.

But by far the most important moment for me was to see this young fellow. This 10 years old is  selling coconut in the park and trying to make his living. There he sees us with our telescopes and comes to us, probably to sell his coconuts. We encourage him to see through our telescope and he sees Jupiter with his moons!

This is what we do here folks! This is what defines us. We love to take our telescopes to the people who will always be neglected here. Seeing this image makes me so happy :) We are doing something right here!

Thank you to all the members of LAST for taking some time out and making this day a memorable event for all of us.

(These images are taken by members of 'Lahore Astronomical Society')

'LAST' April monthly meeting

Last night meeting of 'Lahore Astronomical Society' was great.. We had two presentations: Syed Roshaan was to talk about basic astronomical imaging skills with simple equipment that anybody can have.. next Maroof Mian was talking about Life cycles of stars.

Maroof did a great job in explaining details of each steps involved in stellar life, from birth to death. He also talked about why a star behaves the way it behaves, using HR diagram. We and those who are new to astronomy loved every bit of it.

The content in Syed Roshaan's talk was arranged in such a way that he managed to teach many different ways of his own learning curve in a very simple way. I was very impressed with his skills and the deep passion he has for imaging with such simple tools. I should be doing much more than what i currently am Roshaan :)

Oh and last but not the least, my son was there and he just loves this stuff.. We have much more in common other than our genes :)

World Space Week at FC College

WOW.. what a sun gazing session it was! We had set three telescopes there​, two with Solar filter on and one halpha solar telescope with a binoviewer at the eyepiece end.

For three hours, students and faculty members kept on coming to our telescopes and most of them saw the solar surface first time in their lives. I heard many many 'WOWs" during that time period. It was a hot day and i with many others were trying their best to fight off the heat with all our astro will.​

We were asked all sorts of question about how the sun generates such massive energy and what does individual feature on the solar surface mean, which they all were watching ​through these telescopes. 

I am very grateful for the media folks from Express Tv Channel, to have come there and recorded all the event and stayed there till the end.​ I am also very thankful to "Benade Physics Society" of FC College and specially their president Amina Saleem.

As always, the members of Lahore Astronomical Society always find time to arrange such events​. Special Thanks to Maroof Mian, Ali Khan and Muhammad Ali.

Lahore Astronomical Society's October Meeting

I am very grateful to all those who came this evening in our monthly meeting. It was also great to see so many students from Space Science Department.

Ali Khan, our head of ATM (Amateur Telescope Making) gave a thorough introduction of mirror making and then how to make a telescope. The grinding methods and polishing was beautifully explained by showing each step with the mirrors in hands. He also described some key terminologies and the advantages and disadvantages of various configurations of the mirror designs. Many attendees asked important questions of the procedure of grinding techniques and Ali, as he always does, came up with easy to understand words/examples that kept us hooked during his whole lecture. He was thanked with a big round of applause.

World Space Week will be very busy for us.. So many vanues were under discussion. FC college will probably be our first venue with solar observations both with white light solar filters and with Halpha dedicated solar telescopes.


And last but not least, we are definitely going to Thandiani, Abbottabad and the number of participants are growing so fast.. Perfect!

These are the pictures taken by our dear member Mudassir​, who is always great with his camera.