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In reply to: Variable Star Section Meeting, Sept 2
In reply to: Subscription Renewal Options
Hi Michael,
You can see the prices for the different types of membership at this link:
https://britastro.org/join
The rate that would apply to you would be Ordinary Digital, £32.50.
To alter your membership type you can call (0207 734 4145 10am-4pm Mon-Fri) or email (office@britastro.org) the Office. They can update your renewal membership type, or you can renew to the new type over the phone. If they update your renewal membership type, then when you press the renew button in Sheep you will see your new membership type and price.
Best wishes,
AndyIn reply to: Silly but quick question
Hi Gordon,
There are no silly questions 🙂
For those who have joined in the past few years, your subscription becomes due on the day of the year you joined. For those who joined many years ago, the annual subscription always ran from 1st August to 31st July the next year.
Reminder emails are sent to every member who has provided an email address, about 95% of members. Those who have not given an email address are sent letters. The reminder emails are sent before the renewal is due, then several after payment was due if the member has not renewed.
Gordon, you can login to SheepCRM to see your renewal date. If you are not logged into the BAA website then click:
Login -> Renew Membership
If you are logged into the BAA website then:
Account -> My membership
You use the same password that you use for the BAA website but you have to login separately to SheepCRM.
I won’t give out specific details on the forum, but Gordon’s subscription is not due for a few months.
Best wishes,
Andy (BAA Systems Manager)We are now only two weeks away from the Comet Section meeting at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. It looks as if there will be no train strikes that weekend and spaces are still available so, if you haven’t already registered, now is the time to do so! Full details of the event can be found at:
https://britastro.org/event/comet-section-meeting-3
The nearest station to the venue is Cutty Sark which is on the DLR. From here it is only a few minutes’ walk to the museum with entry through the gates on Romney Road. There is also a bus stop right outside the museum for services 129, 177, 188, 286, 386 and N1. The grounds around the museum will open as normal at 7am but the doors will not open until 9am. We need to be out of the museum by 6pm. Please bring your Ticket Tailor booking with you so that we can check you off at the door. If you are early there are plenty of excellent places to buy coffee or breakfast between the station and the park.
The meeting starts with an introduction in the Lecture Theatre at 9:30am followed by a walk up the hill for the special comet-themed planetarium show which will start just after 10am. If you arrive late you can meet us at the planetarium around 09:45 or join when the meeting proper starts back at the Lecture Theatre at 11am. There will be FAS and BAA representatives at the museum entrance, in the lecture theatre and at the planetarium to welcome you.
We have a lunch break scheduled from 12:45 – 13:45. No lunch is provided so bring your own and eat it in beautiful Greenwich Park (sunny weather not guaranteed). You can also get lunch from the cafe at the museum although this is likely to be very busy and we only have an hour. There are plenty of great pubs in the area but getting lunch offsite would be very challenging given the timings. I suggest you don’t try and reserve any pub visits until after the meeting!
All of the talks will be recorded and we will put them online after the event. The meeting schedule is quite tight but there will be an opportunity to ask questions and some time for discussion at the end of the meeting. This is a great opportunity to meet fellow comet enthusiasts face-to-face.
My thanks to Flamsteed Astronomy Society and the NMM for making this meeting possible and to the BAA for support with administration and finances. We currently have over 80 people booked and I’m looking forward to seeing many of you there.
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There is a simple fix, which is to provide you with two observer codes and logins.
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This would not be as neat a solution, as it would split your observations into two observers.This approach has worked well for me in a different context.
In the past I have been engaged in significant collaborative projects where credit was due to two or more people. Hence, for example, THL which is short for Team-Hills-Leyland. Kevin Hills took all the images and performed the astrometry. I did the photometry and uploaded the results.
AAVSO does not understand the value of team-work 😉 so all the joint results were uploaded to their database under my name — with the prior agreement of my cow-orkers of course. So, Ian, when your results wend their way over he Atlantic I am pretty sure that all will be attributed to you.
In reply to: A possible cosmological paradigm?
I agree with you Richard, thank you Paul and Paul for your replies, I just have to try and fully understand them now!
I had an enjoyable career working for Philips Research from 1973 to 2008, mainly in silicon device physics (to 1993) during the time when computing power was rapidly expanding. However, I have always had an interest in the more exotic fields of Cosmology and Quantum/Particle Physics and over the years have tried to
improve my knowledge in these areas. So now that I have completed my stellar spectroscopy project (BAA Forum topic “Spectral Line Modelling – please would somebody review the work) I think my winter project will be to try once again to improve my cosmological knowledge.In the past I have tried to work my way through quite a few books on GR (getting a little further each time) more recently I have worked through the “Theoretical Minimum” books by Lenoard Susskind and got to chapter 10 (before running out of steam!) of “Quantum Field Theory for the gifted amateur” by Tom Lancaster & Stephen j. Blundell, I have also bought “Covariant Physics” by Moataz H. Emam. It’s difficult working alone so would anybody like to join me in studying these books? Are there better books?
One last comment on this topic and I appologise if it sounds a bit mystical, but I don’t think we will get a “theory of everything” until we can fit “free will” or at least the illusion of free will into the picture something that I thought might be possible with my suggestion of a variable Planck “Constant”.
In reply to: Bob Mizon
David – What a tale! – I know that windy road well but had not realised that you and Bob were joint partners in crime over there. very nice. If only Bob were here to give his side of the story!
In 2019 I acquired a car full of books from the late Peter Richards-Jones, in my role as Librarian for the Society for the History of Astronomy. Many of the books have joined the Library and others have been sold on. Amongst the books, were a couple of boxes of old slides and film reels of various formats from the 1950s onwards. Earlier this year I finally got around to sorting through these boxes. After consulting with a number of people, I decided I would have to study the films in case there was anything of astronomical significance. I purchased a second hand projector from the 1970s which could play Super8 and regular 8 film, and once I’d worked out how to use, projected the films onto my dining room wall and watched them. Most were family videos of holidays abroad, and using my DSLR camera I recorded video of the film being projected on a white wall. I have since sent these digital copies to the son of Peter who is overjoyed to see the footage he has never seen before of his family and of himself from the 1960s and 1970s. There were several films of the Moon and of the Sun in eclipse, but there were also three films of historic importance. The first is a film showing what I believe is the construction of a building at Ewell Observatory; I’ve messaged them but no reply yet. The second is a 10 minute long film of the 1973 eclipse of the Sun as viewed from the Monte Umbe – the last 30 seconds or so of the video show people onboard and once I’ve edited the eclipse I will share this. The third is a 3 minute video of a Winchester Weekend at King Alfred’s College in Winchester. There is no date, but with the help of Richard McKim and Martin Mobberley we are pretty sure it is the 1972 Winchester Weekend, held in July 1972. The write up of this meeting by Charles Wise and the accompanying group photograph is posted here and taken from JBAA 1972, 82, 6, pages 440-441. I showed the video at the Winchester Weekend just and promised to share it on the BAA Forum. We are keen to know if anyone was at this meeting and would love to know who the people are who appear in the video. It would also be valuable for the BAA Archives if others had videos of past Winchester Weekends, or other BAA events from the past. There is no sound to this film.
In reply to: Using ASTAP for comet measurements
There’s a conversation on the ASTAP forum about adding a circle / ellipse and how to measure the sky background. Perhaps others who know more about comet photometry than me (most people!) could advise and join?
https://sourceforge.net/p/astap-program/discussion/suggestions/thread/b1c1be085c/
Han has added the option to measure inside a circle / ellipse now in the development version (right mouse drag while holding down the Ctrl key).
Thanks
MarkIn reply to: Historical Section Newsletter 27
Over the last few years I have been imaging asteroids named for people I follow Twitter and then tweeting the results.
I encourage others to join me in imaging asteroids named after (ex-)BAA members who have been likewise honoured. Over time we should be able to complete a comprehensive gallery.
If anyone is at least remotely interested I could add the ones already taken to my personal gallery.
Topic: Evening Stars
Jupiter and Venus are in the evening sky just now and on this evening (2023 February 22) they were joined by our Moon. Image captured at 18:00UT with Jupiter at upper left and Venus at lower right, simply using an iPhone.
Over the next week the planets will appear to move toward each other until being only 0.5 degrees (Moon’s apparent diameter) apart on March 2.
Attachments:
The people of the world come from a variety of social, educational, and cultural backgrounds. This means that even though they are looking up at exactly the same stars that you are, they see different patterns than you. Even within your own culture there will be differences. People have used the sky as:
• A calendar, and/or
• A divination system, and/or
• A navigational tool, and/or
• A weather prediction system, and/or
• A place to honor:
o Their deities
o Their ancestors, or
o Their culture.
This is a practice that continues to this day.
This World Asterisms Project is a living project started in June 2021 by the Inclusivity and Diversity Committee of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada as a celebration of the sky cultures of the world: It continues to grow as the process of naming the stars above is an ongoing process. It is also growing as ethnoastronomers and researchers investigate old records and interview elders and recover previously lost sky cultures. The World Asterisms Project has so far examined over 481 of the world’s cultures and recorded 11,326 asterisms including 1,322 telescopic and 428 names of the Milky Way. We have separate lists for names of the Sun, Moon, and Planets from various cultures: 1,567 so far.
We are stewards of these records and are using the “Two Eyes Seeing” approach pioneered by members of our Halifax Centre of the RASC in their ongoing partnership with the Mi’kmaq people to recover their sky lore: the shared perspectives of astronomers and knowledge keepers. We are doing our best to avoid exonyms and use the names these people use for themselves. We are identifying the asterisms here and whenever possible directing people to representatives of the cultures involved for information on the sky stories or dream lines related to those asterisms.
This project has six parts which you can download for free:
Volume One is the World Asterism Project Handbook that lists the more than 11,000 asterisms alphabetically by subject so that you can see how these subjects cross cultures. Whenever possible we describe the star patterns in detail, describe the history behind it when we can, list all the variations in spelling that we have encountered, and list all the names and spelling in the language of the people when possible. We identify the people who first recorded or named these asterisms when possible.
Volume Two is the World Asterisms Project List which lists the more than 11,000 asterisms with their exact location in the sky (right ascension and declination) with some basic notes on the stars involved. This is provided in both PDF and Excel format so that you can search the lists and create your own lists.
Volume Three is the World Asterisms Project Sky Cultures Resource List which identifies all the sky cultures that we’ve examined, gives their location in the world, and lists all resources available which can be used to learn more about them.
Volume Four is the World Asterisms Project Milky Way Names list.
Volume Five is the World Asterisms Project Solar System Objects Handbook describing the names of the Sun Moon, and Planets.
Volume Six is the World Asterisms Project Solar System Objects List.
You can download these for free here: https://rasc.ca/world-asterism-project
We are making this free to facilitate access for researchers, students, and educators.
This is a work in progress as we add new discoveries and update current ones. We periodically update these volumes on our website as they continue to grow. We have also created a World Asterisms Project Google Drive for researchers involved in this project as partners and supporters. In this drive we keep the current drafts, shared asterism files, and a “new” page which describes current work.
We are reaching out to the people of the world: If you have information on your sky culture to share, please share it with us. If you are interested in joining our team, contact us and we can add you to the researchers who have access to those lists. If you have any questions, suggestions, or corrections, please contact us and we’d be happy to assist you. This information is being provided free to all, but we encourage you to donate to the RASC to support our work.When I heard about UK Spaceports I envisioned mini versions of the Kennedy Launch Complex. I believe that the Scottish spaceports will be vertical launches, whereas the Cornwall spaceport will release a rocket from under the wing of a 747 aircraft. These first launchers are for putting CubeSats and similar small payloads into Earth orbit, joining the growing number of launch service providers.
It’s good if this provides training and careers for UK engineers and scientists, although we’ll have to rely on NASA, SpaceX, ESA, et al for mainstream heavy lifting to the ISS, the Moon and deep space.
A recent manned flight to the edge of space was investigated by the FAA as to whether it deviated from its approved flightpath. Let’s hope we don’t start dropping any debris onto our friends in France, Portugal, Norway…
Alex.
In reply to: Partial solar eclipse of 2022 October 25
And hello to Duncan again!
I didn’t have my BAA Handbook at hand when typing my previous replies last last night but now I have I can perhaps shed some light on the eclipse diagram to which you refer.
Diagrams such as these are taken from the NASA eclipses website rather than being generated by the BAA, and there is an explanatory page about them at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEplot/SEplotkey.html which might help you. It is, unfortunately, worded in very technical terms but the last part should help you understand the various numbers and times around the map. But basically the blue lines are lines of equal eclipse magnitude and the green lines join places where maximum eclipse for that place occurs at the same time. A larger and clearer version of the magnitude/time plot for the UK appears on page 273 of the current version of the Journal, where the text clearly says that the numbers are magnitudes rather than obscurations.
Hope that helps!
In reply to: New variable star charts
Yes Duncan. If the chart is on the web, then observers are encouraged to upgrade their charts to include the new revised ones.
I haven’t yet been notified of your request to join the alert group. If nothing happens in the next 24h, drop me an email and I’ll do it manually.
Gary
In reply to: Exoplanets On-line Workshop
This is the last chance to register for the Exoplanets Online Workshop. Registration closes on Eventbrite at 10am this morning (Saturday 12th November).
https://baa-exoplanets-2022.eventbrite.co.uk
Registration is required as we are holding this as a Zoom meeting, where attendees can talk or share their screen, so we will not be making the Zoom join link public.
Andy
Topic: Hello
Hello, I’ve just joined and wanted to see if I could post properly. I’m strictly a visual amateur astronomer and I am also physically disabled. I have several telescopes ranging from a 60mm refractor to a 235mm SCT.
Telescopes: One Newtonian, three Maksutov Cassegrains, seven refractors, and a large SCT.
Hello everyone,
my name is Andrea and I’m from Italy.
This is my first post on this forum since I’ve joined the BAA this spring. I hope my message finds you well.
I’m not really sure if this is the best section to make a post about this topic or if it would have been better to put it on the “History” forum. Anyways I’ll give it a go here.I’d like to know more about an antique Steinheil Muenchen refractor telescope that I’ve recently found on a local website for buying and selling astro-gear. I’m really interested in buying it, as I’m quite fascinated by its history, but I have to admit that I’m not an expert in ancient telescopes (this would be my first one) and so I hope that some of you can help me!
Under this message you’ll find attached some photos that the seller has shared.The instrument is 70mm in aperture and bears the serial (I think) number 8915. We don’t know in which year it was made. It comes with several accessories and in particular three eyepieces of different (and unknown) focal lengths. The telescope is complete with a lens cap and a removable black mounting block has been added to allow its use with some modern mount, since the original one is absent. The seller has told me that the instrument is usable, but probaly in need of some cleaning and restoration. I haven’t personally seen it yet, because it’s a two and a half hours drive from my hometown to the seller location.
The seller doesn’t know how much he should ask me for it (he has received wildy different quotes) and I don’t know how much to offer. Can you guys give me a quote?
Thank you for your time and I hope to hear from you!
Kind regards,Andrea
Topic: Globular Cluster Marathon
Many of you know that I have been imaging small planetary satellites of the gas and ice giants. My stamp collection is now almost full in that the remaining ones are below magnitude 22.0 at best. Some of you may be aware of https://britastro.org/section_information_/deep-sky-section-overview/observing-programmes/globular-clusters/the-gc-marathons-part-i-galactic-globular-clusters which I wrote a couple of years back. Unfortunately, a couple of links there were broken when the BAA site was updated but http://www.astropalma.com/Projects/GC_Marathon.html still works.
Accordingly, I have now started imaging GCs and will eventually put them in the BAA gallery and my personal web pages. I have only managed 14 out of 158 so far but hope to pick up a few more in the next week while Sgr et al. are still visible. At least twenty are too far south for a telescope in La Palma and a few more are visible only in the IR. To summarize: only 10% have so far been done.
I urge others to join in this escapade.
In reply to: Rev T.E.Espin’s Calver telescope :action needed
Hi Denis,
Thanks for this. Very interesting.
I have a personal interest insofar as I was a Geology PhD student in Newcastle 1976-1979 and my supervisor was the late Dr M. Hugh Battey. I seem to recall that he was one a select few who used the telescope for their own devices – he frequently invited me to join him in observations but, alas, I never was able to. This failure I have always regretted.
I believe the observatory was located at the Closehouse Estate to the west of Newcastle – at the time this was the University’s main sports centre and I often played football there. I believe the University sold off Closehouse some years ago. I always wondered what happened to the observatory/telescopes. A few years ago at a BAA meeting in Newcastle I was told that the observatories were no more and that the telescopes were in store (= lost). Believing this, I felt the University had committed a gross act barbarity.
Closehouse is now, I think, some sort of luxury hotel. It was suggested to me that the hotel now owned what was left of the observatory but my informant was not sure. I haven’t been able to find much information about it.
Are we talking about the same place? Or has my age-addled memory failed (again)?
I would be very keen to see these items at least preserved if not restored. I would help as much as I can, but I fear this would be not much in a practical sense.
Best Wishes,
Trevor
British Astronomical Association
Supporting amateur astronomers since 1890
