- This topic has 10 replies, 10 voices, and was last updated 5 years, 8 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
This is bad news, I’m afraid…
Following on from the other thread about astronomy magazines, it is a sad end to a venerable journal.
Maybe some other publisher will take it on and revive it’s standing.
I imagine whether it is bad news depends upon who buys it.
In recent years it had become a pale shadow of its former self.
The magazine has become increasingly banal, hiring editors with no skills in the area they are supposed to be running. The website is often behind the curve with information and is increasing prone to hyperbole, especially the chap that writes the observing bits. The editor seems increasing detached from the running of the magazine and writes puff pieces.
I have collected S@T from 1950 to 2012 and stopped taking it when it became so much poorer than it used to be. The highlight of my postal month used to be when S@T dropped through the letterbox. Then it became a huge disapointment as I looked at the reduced number of pages and the loss of serious observing advice by experts such asthat given in John Bortle’s Comet Digest. The relegation of the ATM telescope making pages to a single page was a big loss. The editorials seems to be concentrated on what the editorial team was doing rather than highlighting the latest developments in astronomy. Can S@T survive and become a popular magazine for amateurs and regain some of the prominence it once held. I hope so, but I am not holding my breath!
I belong to another forum which has discussed this disappointing news. I stopped subscribing a while ago for many of the reasons already stated.
Some posts on the other forum have been giving links that may be of interest to those of us who find digital content useful, as I do.
This one goes to archive.org which are the PDFs of 1625 past copies of S&T
This one is to an index as a spreadsheet which is quite good if not in complete detail
https://s22380.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/stindex-thru-December-2018.xls
Still available on the S&T website are DVDs of ‘The Sky’ and ‘The Telescope’ which were two separate publications prior to their merging in the early 1940s into S&T.
https://www.shopatsky.com/sale-clearance
The link above shows the two mentioned along with many other items, one of which, interestingly, is the BAA sky chart prepared by Wil Tirion some years ago now!
It appears that the DVDs that were once on sale with many old S&Ts are not now available.
Hopefully this is of interest to some members.
As mentioned,I find digital content very useful as it can be readily searched in this computer age, for items of interest, but I also enjoy collecting the ‘old fashioned‘ paper versions as well, mainly books, but that is for another thread.
Sad sad news, but no surprise. I stopped subscribing to S&T about 6 years ago, as there became less and less material on observational astronomy, and, more to the point, the telescope and equipment side of amateur astronomy. S&T survived in an era when many amateur’s still built their own telescopes. Those days seem to be gone, sadly, and this venerable publication has lost it’s way in the modern astronomical age.
It looks as if the publishing company has gone under, but the title may survive. It would be a pity to see this venerable name consigned to history. It raises the question of how many astronomy magazines the market can support . . .
This is an interesting read.
Many thanks to John Chuter for the link to the archive. Having ditched my S&T collection a while ago in a house move I am thrilled to find the magazines are still available. Reading some of the early ones today, it is almost unimaginable that such interesting and in-depth writing was possible in a popular magazine not so very long ago.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.