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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
Good points James but I think the gallery and the section archive serve different purposes and it would be difficult, and probably not very effective, to combine the two. The gallery is a great way to share images with members and others but the section archive is our permanent record of observations. It may be frustrating that each section has a different way of naming files but that is the world as it is and it really isn’t that difficult to follow the filenaming rules when submitting images.
Given the amount of effort required to make the observation, both in terms of obtaining the data and processing it, it surprises me that even some of the world’s best comet imagers can’t spend a few more minutes to add key details like equipment, exposure time, duration, orientation and field-of-view. I know that analysts can often derive these by plate-solving but sometimes that is not possible and they have more than enough to do anyway. Also, C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) has demonstrated again how dynamic comet tails are on multiple scales so accurate information is critical to making the best use of images.
I’m very grateful for all of the images that the section receives but a little more work on behalf of the observer would make many of them much more valuable in the long term.
Nick.
I very much appreciate the vast deal of work that section officers do. It is indeed important to recognise that this is voluntary work, and volunteers generally do their best work when they’re given as much freedom and autonomy as possible. The BAA sections operate in very different ways, and I agree with Nick that this inevitable – not least because many collaborate with external organisations in very different ways.
But I think the question of why many observers don’t submit images to the BAA sections is an important one, and it’s a pity to imply that it’s because observers can’t be bothered. Meaning no disrespect to the sections, I suspect observers who don’t submit their work probably aren’t actually that interested in doing so. I don’t think the BAA has ever tried to collect evidence as to the reasons, and I can only base my speculation on guesswork.
In the past I’ve heard these people dismissed as somehow ‘now serious observers’. But as Nick says, many of the world’s leading imagers don’t submit images. Browsing online astrophotography galleries, or the finalists of astrophotography competitions, how many of the names are BAA members – even among folks who clearly have a great deal of talent (and kit)? I suspect people who submit observations to the BAA are a minority, even among very serious observers.
So, what are these people doing, if not submitting to BAA sections? A lot of observers are motivated by wanting to build a social media following. Others are clearly motivated by trying to monetise their images (though I wonder how many are successful). Others are over the moon if they get 100 likes on Facebook.
To use some trendy lingo, I think if the BAA wants to maximise engagement from observers, it needs to provide a user experience that members find fulfilling. It needs to build a positive relationship with observers, not seem to chastise them. The solar and comet sections have been pioneers in making their section archives browsable online, and Nick and Peter Meadows deserve a lot of credit for this. I would imagine (once again, with no evidence) observers find it far more satisfying contributing to an archive they can see online.
My conscious aim when I set up the member albums (almost a decade ago now!) was to try to replicate as much of the social media experience that people clearly crave, within the BAA community. I agree with James that this could have been integrated with the work of the sections to a much greater degree – I suspect to everybody’s mutual benefit – but for various reasons it didn’t happen.
The galleries are consciously designed to be as accessible as possible to the BAA sections – for example, the search-by-object-type categories are aligned with the BAA sections. And although a restrictive file size limit was initially in place, I think the current limit is larger than what can reasonably be attached to an email.
Dominic
Thanks both. Useful discussion.
I think it is one thing for the BAA to ignore images uploaded to social media, it just seems a loss that the BAA is not archiving images its members have uploaded to their BAA member pages.
People are fundamentally quite lazy, and for someone like me [very lazy] who are not devoted to just one section, the thought of having to research each time the file name requirements of the Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Lunar, Solar, Comet, Meteor, M&V sections each time to submit an observation to the archive is just a non-starter.
Most of my observations are not very good, but they don’t need to be very good to play a vital role in an archive; they may show a feature was really there and not an artefact, or fill in a gap in a time line… For bog standard BAA members like me, there are few [if any] personal benefits from going to all the additional effort to submit to the Section archives when my observation is already on my member page for others to look at and comment on; the only one missing out on my observation not being in the archive is the BAA.
I note neither of you have said it would be impossible to automate the process whereby an observation uploaded to the member pages be prepared in the background for consideration of acceptance into the relevant archive, at the sections discretion. It seems a shame that this is not an aspiration. It cannot be beyond the wit of man, nor outside the budget of the BAA. Maybe it is just not important, I don’t know.
It would be interesting to know what proportion of member page observations / images are in the relevant section archives.
Thanks again both, and thanks to all the various section officers who are the backbone of BAA; none of this is meant as a moan at any of you.
James
Hi James,
A few thoughts on your thoughts!
I don’t know about you, but I only post to my member’s page the best of my images. The normal run of the mill ones, that still have value as you rightly point out, never make it there but they still go to the relevant section. I sometimes wonder if this showcasing the best can act as a disincentive to observers to submit observations to the sections. They may feel, given they are not regularly producing this level of quality, their normal observations are of no use.
It is important to remember that it is not just about putting images into a Section archive but being able to retrieve them in a sensible manner. This is presumably why there is a need for standard filenames. If a hotchpotch of names came down from the personal pages this retrieval process could be seriously compromised.
In a largely successful attempt to ‘lazify’ the use of standard filenames, I have taken the following approach. For each planet there is a Photoshop template with a generic filename specific to the requirements of that section. So, for example, the one for Mars is 2025-mm-dd-ttttUT-DRB. The image is pasted into the template which is then saved replacing mm, dd etc with the new values. The template also has ‘fill in the blanks’ text for additional information such as seeing and CM values. I find this reduces the effort considerably and minimises he risk of key information being forgotten. If you think these may be of any use to yourself, message me through the website with your email address and I will be happy to pass them over.
David.
James,
Technically, everything you’re asking for is possible.
Concerns about file naming conventions are a bit of a distraction. The image gallery collects the name of the observer and the time of observation as compulsory metadata on all images. People don’t always fill in the object name (and sometimes they observe things that aren’t in the object database yet…), but I tend to fill it in retrospectively where it is left blank, to make the galleries more usefully searchable. With that information available in the database, you could easily imagine an automated process to assign the images whatever filename format is desired when section officers export them.
Adding other metadata is simply a plumbing job.
Best wishes,
Dominic
James – If you really are that lazy (and I’m sure you are not) then I’m surprised that you have the energy to make the observations in the first place! Each section will have its own way of accepting observations and the basic rules are pretty easy to follow. You don’t need to remember them, you can use the wonderful invention of writing to make notes and set up a procedure to follow for each object. It will then only take a few minutes of your time.
I have never dismissed people as “not serious observers” if they don’t want to do this. It is personal choice and the quality of the images in the gallery is fantastic whether or not you want to submit them to the section. I would like to encourage you to do so but you need to follow our rules. That means making sure that all of the key observation details are recorded and using a filename which is compatible with our requirements. One of the things that makes the BAA special is that we do try to encourage people to think of the science behind their observations. For me, that greatly increases my enjoyment of the hobby. It will be different for others.
As Dominic says, we could spend time trying to make the gallery into a source for the section archive but there are other priorities for our website developers at the moment and this would still mean that many images would not be imported since they lack critical details.
As a compromise, I’m currently discussing with Denis whether he is willing to manually collect data from the gallery that has appropriate metadata and reformat it so that it can be put in the archive. I’ll let you know the outcome of that discussion.
Thanks Nick.
Poor Denis! Sorry Denis.
With sufficient website access privileges one can search for all comet observations on the member pages for a given period and download them to a file in one go, along with their metadata file. But I guess you and Denis know this already.
James
Thanks Nick, and apologies if your original message got a bit hijacked.
The comet section archives are an incredible resource, and I hope everybody submits their images.
We can do this manually although it is a bit fiddly to extract the metadata. Is there a query that I can run on the gallery database that would allow me to automatically download the full-res image and get the associated metadata in a standard format? Once I have the metadata I can reformat the filename and generate the data text file that goes into our section archive.
Nick,
Yeah – I’m sure that’s possible. I’ve deliberately made the database schema as intuitive as possible, so that if I go under a bus, the BAA shouldn’t find it too hard to find a database / web engineer who can make sense of all the data.
I suggest we switch this thread to email, to avoid sharing the details publicly with hackers.
Best wishes,
Dominic
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