“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” - Oscar Wilde

Just one of a very few possible finds from the Observatory's gutters

"Micrometeoritic dust falls on the surface of the Earth at a rate of 6,000 kg per day. This sounds a lot but if you average this across the surface area of our planet it works out at only one particle per square metre per year. To maximise finding one of these micrometeorites increasing the collection area works. One place to look in urban areas is in the rain water gutters of large roofs. 

To that purpose I mobilised the Jodrell Plank Observatory team to get up on the roof and go prospecting!

Many micrometeorites contain magnetite, a magnetic form of iron oxide and commonly known as lodestone. So once the team had collected a pot of dust from the Observatory gutters, the magnetic particles were separated from the rest using a neodymium magnet. The magnetic particles were then inspected under a microscope.  Post industrialisation, much of the magnetic dust in our atmosphere is man-made rather than extra-terrestrial. So whether we found any micrometeorites is debatable. What cannot be denied however, is at no appreciable cost, the Observatory's roof gutters have never been so clean".

 Kurt Thrust - current Director of the Jodrell Plank Observatory

Two Persied meteors seen against the summer Milky Way - Canon 600D DSLR - 30 secs at ISO3200 on a Star Adventurer equatorial mount. Taken by Kurt Thrust  in 2015 from a dark sky location in Northumberland

 "Great work with no hit on the domestic budget and talking about domestics we are still having problems with our neighbour Mr. Shrodinger and his wandering cat. Unlike his cat this is not a problem likely to go away unless someone takes commonsense action. Today I have taken the executive decision to ask Waffles Construction Ltd to provide the Trust with a quotation for building a wall between the Observatory and Mr. Shrodinger's property. Great!" 

Ronald Clump - CEO - Jodrell Plank Observatory