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• Create Date 1 July 2025
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BASIL July 2025

The front cover shows BAS President Prof. David Southwood with BAS Vice Presidents Prof. Diana Worrall and Mel Rigby, at the Presidential Address on 20 June 2025.

Members' recent astrophotography has focused on the Moon:

• Strawberry Moon by Nigel Wakefield.
• Rupes Recta - the Straight Wall (or the Sword) by Chris Lee.
• 'Thor's Hammer' by Chris Lee.
• Montes Alpes and Surroundings by Chris Lee.

Key topics for June include:

• The α-Capricornid meteor shower will be active from 3 July to 15 August, producing its peak rate of meteors around 30 July.
• How to observe noctilucent clouds over the summer.
• 16 July: Saturn and Neptune less than a degree apart (01:40 BST)
• Observe the 'Buck Moon' and Crater Gassendi with a small telescope.
• 25 DSO observing targets are listed for the month.
• Constellation of the month is Hercules, which is well placed to observe - see links to star charts and DSO targets.

See the included links for the latest astronomy news topics:

• JWST digs into structural origins of disk galaxies
• Sir Francis Graham-Smith, 1923–2025
• MESSENGER: Mercury & Venus Section Newsletter
• BAA Deep Sky Update – May 2025
• Will asteroid 2024 YR4 hit the Moon?
• ESA Week in images: 16-20 June 2025
• Hubble Captures an Active Galactic Center
• PODCAST: Mars is Hard - Here's Why
• NASA’s Chandra Shares a New View of Our Galactic Neighbor - M31
• Webb refines Bullet Cluster mass and maps dark matter distribution
• Exoplanet hunters may be misrepresenting the likelihood of their findings

Society News includes the programme of meeting and events up to October 2025 and a report on the Presidential Address in June.

Finally, Stephen Hawking said:

"Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the Universe go to all the bother of existing?"