Welcome & introduction

Want to know more about astronomy? Want to see the wonders of the Universe?

Welcome to our public outreach and events pages. Talk, Tea and Telescope is a series of public lectures organised by the University of Birmingham Astronomical Society and the School of Physics and Astronomy. These lectures are aimed at members of the general public and are free to all. Future event details will be posted here accordingly. The lectures generally take place on a Thursday evening and are followed by night sky observing with a combination of telescopes focusing on the Astronomical society's historic Grubb telescope (dating from 1872) - of course this is weather dependent and if we are beaten by the weather then you can guarantee that there will be time for tea and discussion after the talks.

We currently don't have any future talks planned for this series, please check back soon. However, take a look at the evening lecture programme run by the IoP at Birmingham.

BBC Stargazing Live 2013

AstroSoc, partnering with the BBC and other academic groups and local Astronomical Societies, are hosting a series of events to coincide with the BBC Two Stargazing Live series. These events will be on Wednesday 9th and Saturday 12th of January. Entry is by ticket only. For more information please see here.

Talks Location: Unless otherwise stated the talks take place in the Large Lecture Theatre (S02) of the Poynting Physics Building (R13 on University Map) at the University of Birmingham. Directions to the University can be found on the University's visitor information pages and a campus map can be found here.

Our last talk: How hot is the Universe? by Prof Trevor Ponman

Conditions here on Earth can give a very misleading picture of the Universe at large. How hot do you think most of the matter in the Universe is? In this talk we will take a quick look at what the Universe is made of. We will then explore what modern astronomy has revealed about the state of the atomic matter - the only component we understand - and we will ask how it got that way.

Other Events: We run a variety of events aimed at the public and students, see our outreach pages, for example on Oct 4th 2008 we ran "Birmingham Space Day" - this event was aimed at all ages of the general public and featured talks and interactive workshops (such as making rockets and mars landers). For more information see the space day site. A similar event was held on March 14th 2009 to celebrate "Pi Day - the mathematics of the Universe.".

Past Talks: In the past we have had talks by: Lucy Hawking (author), Alastair Reynolds (author), Dr David Malin (AAO), Dr Fred Watson (AAO), Dr David Whitehouse (BBC Science Correspondent), Mr Mario di Maggio (ThinkTank Planetarium Director), Dr David Gregory (BBC West Midlands), Prof. John Brown (Royal Astronomer for Scotland and Glasgow University), Prof Ian Morison (Jodrell Bank and Gresham College), Dr Brian Cox (Manchester University, CERN), Dr Paul Roche (Cardiff University, FT), Dr Martin Hendry (University of Glasgow), Dr Mike Hapgood (RAL), Dr Lucie Green (MSSL) and Prof Peter Kalmus (QMUL). Much more info can be found on our talks pages.

Some of these talks have been funded by a Science and Technology Facilities Council Grant.