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With C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) putting on a good show at the moment there are lots of excellent images being posted on the BAA Gallery. That’s a great way of sharing images with BAA members but they don’t automatically get submitted to the Comet Section image archive.
Our archive is probably one of the largest collections of comet images in the world. It contains images of comets back to the beginning of the last century. I’ve included some links to historical comet collections at the end of this posting so you can see examples of what is there.
https://britastro.org/cometobs/
If you send your images to cometobs@britastro.org they are more likely to end up in the archive. Details of how to submit images to the archive are on this page:
We do sometimes collect images from the BAA gallery but that is a manual process and it often does not get done. In addition, to automate the import process, we expect the files to be named in a particular way. Please also include basic observational information (date, time of exposure, instrument, field of view, orientation) either as a separate text file or as a caption on the image. Submitting images to the archive will ensure that they are available long term and that they are easy to find when reports are written.
For a flavour of what we have in the archive, look at these links:
https://britastro.org/cometobs/1956r1/thumbnails.html
https://britastro.org/cometobs/1957p1/thumbnails.html
https://britastro.org/cometobs/1965s1/thumbnails.html
https://britastro.org/cometobs/1987p1/thumbnails.html
https://britastro.org/cometobs/1995o1/thumbnails.html
https://britastro.org/cometobs/2020f3/thumbnails.htmlIt is a missed opportunity that the member observation database doesn’t align with the various section archives. A member uploading, say a comet observation, could be requested to enter certain metadata to accompany their observation aligned with the comet section archive; an observation of the Sun may request different metadata aligned with the Solar Section archives; a Moon observation request metadata aligned with the Lunar Section Archive… I can see why section directors or section officers don’t want additional jobs and assume important observations will be sent to them for archiving, but I suspect there are plenty of nice and important observations on the member pages which are not in the section archives as members don’t know the importance of submitting them separately to the Section Directors, or can’t be bothered having to seemingly submit things twice.
I’m not tech-savvy enough to know how difficult or not it would be, but it would be advantageous to all if observations submitted to members’ pages could more easily be entered into the specific section archives.
We all appreciate the work of the [unpaid] Section Directors and their officers.
James
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