Antique Telescope Society Meeting 2020

[Alan A.]

Hi,

I am member of the Antique Telescope Society (ATS), and wanted to notify everyone at the BAA about an event we are having.

The ATS is an international society which is now 30 years old. It is a diverse group with many accomplished members, including for example several who have worked on professional ground and space based telescopes.  The ATS is holding it’s annual meeting virtually this year on November 13-14 and 20-21.  The schedule and full details yet to be announced – I will post here on the BAA forum when they are available.

The meeting will be free and open to all, and we anticipate having several hundred attendees from all over the world. I hope many from the BAA will have interest and time to participate.  In addition to scheduled talks, the ATS board would like to have pre-recorded virtual observatory tours of 5-20 minutes each available for attendees.  Each year our society tours both historic and modern observatories, and this year’s focus is to include observatories from around the world, and in particular those which might be less accessible for a regular in person meeting.

If you are someone who works at an observatory or has a relationship with an observatory, and would be able to arrange a virtual observatory tour, please send me an email through the BAA site.  If a tour is pre-recorded and 20 minutes or less, I am hoping it would not be too time consumptive for any who choose to participate.

 

Best

Alan

 

[Denis Buczynski]

Hi Alan, I am looking forward to the ATS meeting online. Can you please tell me your surname, you will know who you are but I cannot place you with a simple A for a surname.

Best wishes

Denis

[Alan A.]

Hi Denis – I sent you an email with my full contact info and surname.

Also, for everyone – a quick update:

Although the ATS  had formally announced meeting dates, they decided today to change them by one day each weekend.  The new dates are now going to be November 14-15, and 21-22.

Best,

Alan

[Alan A.]

Hi,

As promised, here is the full announcement by the Antique Telescope Society for the meeting:

The ATS is very pleased to present an outstanding lineup of presenters and presentations for our first Virtual meeting. In addition, we have a substantial number of virtual observatory tours being offered. You can see the list here:
Up to Date List of Presentations The list of presentations will continue to be updated as more abstracts are submitted, so save the link.

For the up to date Daily Schedule of Events, please go here: Up to Date Daily Schedule This schedule will be updated with the Presentations in their time slots as the program is finalized.

Registration is now available here: FREE REGISTRATION FOR THE CONVENTION When registering, we request you use your real name so that ATS members and guests who’ve never met can get to know one another. Thank you for your cooperation.

[Dr Richard John McKim]

I do not think it is appropriate that contributors to this Forum should use anything other than their real name! 

[Dr Paul Leyland]

We may have to agree to disagree.  There are quite a few “Paul Leyland”s on the net and finding the right one can be difficult. About once every year or two I receive wrongly addressed mail intended for one new to me. I am currently trying to fight Halifax Bank into accepting that I am not the droid they are looking for.

Accordingly I use two pseudonyms, Xilman and Brnikat, both of which are very unusual and so form excellent terms to feed into a search engine if you wish to find me.

[Dominic Ford]

The BAA Forum Terms of Use do say:

“We ask that contributors to the forum and member pages use their full name, to promote a sense of collegiality and community amongst our members.

We certainly consider that to be best practice. However, we currently only enforce this where we suspect dishonesty.

It is important to recognise that many people have very reasonable concerns about posting information about themselves online. People who work in certain professions (state school teachers, social workers, civil servants, etc) can live under the threat of immediate dismissal in the event of a single online post which is perceived to violate their employer’s code of conduct. It is understandable that such people increasingly want to err on the safe side (or feel extreme pressure from their employers), and prefer that their posts should not come up in Google searches for their names.

Others may simply feel they don’t want to release information about themselves to fraudsters Googling for their name.

If there are specific concerns, the website administrators are able to cross-reference any forum post against the BAA membership database.

[Alan Thomas]

As a sideline, there are also a large number of people named  ‘Alan Thomas’ around. This was brought home to me when I worked at the OU in Bletchley years ago. There was an Alan R Thomas also working there and we were forever getting each others mail and phonecalls, which could sometimes be highly embarrassing. Someone would phone and it was often only after about five minutes that you realised you had no idea who they were and what they were talking about! Ever since I have always included my initial in any ‘official’ context.

[Author]

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