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The discussion on this subject by Simon Banton, who I think works for English Heritage on Stonehenge, at the Winchester Weekend, was really interesting as well. A pity it was not recorded. Afterwards I discussed his views with him, comparing his take with that of Prof. Clive Ruggles, who is much more sceptical of some of the claimed predictive purposes of Stonehenge in relation to the movements of the Sun and Moon. Banton takes the view that the builders of these monuments understood quite a lot of astronomy, and has reasonable arguments to back this up.
I’ve encountered this problem of the trains on the West Coast Main Line on Sunday as well, Mike. It means I’ll have to travel back to London using a complicated route via Edinburgh, walking between the two Glasgow stations.
This doesn’t help you however; you may have to use the dreaded rail replacement buses.
David
There are always going to be clashes like that if we organise anything at a weekend, Jack. There are only 52 weekends in a year.
Embedding the video didn’t work very well because of portrait orientation; better seen on Facebook:
https://fb.watch/rt_1gKyFZL/Capturing nebulosity requires low focal ratio. To get optimal correction of chromatic aberration and coma at low focal ratios requires more lens elements. Yes you can use an ED (or similar) doublet with a coma corrector, but that’s 4 lens elements in total, and in most cases it won’t be as optimal as it could be, and there’s likely to be spacing errors, so better really, if you know the telescope will be used for imaging at this focal ratio, to build it all into one optimised, correctly measured-up tube assembly. Many people wish to use the dual-band, tri-band and quad-band filters for one-shot imaging, so chromatic aberration will still be a moot point.
It’s an interesting subject. There is a Moon Treaty to which the UK is a signatory, but it is a product of Cold War thinking, in that only bans nation states from claiming ownership of the Moon or parts of it, it does not prevent businesses based in those states from exploiting the Moon. How can you exploit something you do not own? It is a situation analogous to that with the deep oceans, which are not owned by states, but can be exploited. However there is an international mechanism to regulate that (not without controversy). There is no mechanism at all for the Moon.
This is all a rather different subject to light pollution, however, which is a fairly local issue, within the remit of national and local governments to deal with, if they care.
Incidentally, I don’t think it is a good idea to have a thread in the forum called ‘General’. Threads should be specific to the topics they are concerned with. What you have tried to do here is create a thread for what should be a forum sub-category. I don’t know if we actually can have sub-categories in this forum though.
And researching this topic led me to this fascinating lecture on the use of optical instruments by renaissance painters, very relevant to my talks (Presidential addresses) on the history of the telescope.
Interesting. I’m with James. I think it is a glass object that has been painted, and the painting has been finished, but I doubt it is a telescope. There are various geometrical, navigational and surveying instruments scattered round the room. I think the object in question could be a spirit level, with metal end sections and a short central glass section containing the liquid, through which we see the monkey’s arm. Such a level would be an important tool for a painter drawing horizons and buildings. Unlike a builders’ level, you might not make it with a flat base, as there would be no reason to do so.
They would be very complicated!
If the moons lined up, you would get big tides; if they were at 90º (2 moons) or 60º (3 moons), the tides would partially cancel out. But of course it would also depend on the masses of the moons and their distances from the Earth.
If the Earth had several moons they would probably be in resonant orbits, like those of Jupiter, with specific ratios between the orbital periods. Therefore there would be a certain period after which the same configuration would recur, and so would the same tidal conditions.
Yes, the basis of Conrad’s novel ‘The Secret Agent’, in which the author imagines an elaborate background plot to this event, linked to the Russians (who seem to be permanent bogey-men of espionage and terror in the British imagination).
It is possible to reduce undesirable inhibition through methods other than alcohol, Nick, and other inhibitions had best not be reduced. We want to remain in Sparsholt College’s good books.
I’ve had a further think about this, and decided we are not going to do it in a drunken manner in a bar, we are going to make as good a job of it as possible. I’ve put it on the agenda for Sunday afternoon at Winchester, and the words will be printed in the programme.
OK, I’ve given this a go, and I found the words are extremely difficult to fit to the tune, especially the final line of each quatrain. The secret is to put the main stresses there on the B of ‘British’ and the A of ‘Association’. The final word has to be sung ‘As-so-ci-a-tion’, not, as printed in 1924, ‘Associ-a-ti-on’
To get a unified rendition of it, with a group, one would need to print up an accented copy of the words, similar to what church choirs use for singling psalms.
It would work best, exactly as the report says, with one person singing all the words, and the rest joining in only on the choruses consisting of repeats of the last pair of lines in each quatrain.
If people are serious about this, I’ll offer to conduct a rehearsal.
To reply to Duncan, in respect of the 2023 vote on membership rates, the Trustees voted to increase the young person’s membership, but the Council voted to keep it at the same level (but their vote was only advisory on the Trustees). On the same day, the membership plus Council members present at the SGM also voted to keep it unchanged, so that became the binding decision. The proposal in the SGM came from Council members. In other words, under the By-laws change proposed, which gives the final decision to Council, the result would have been the same (but achieved more quickly). We’re dealing with very small numbers of votes here. There were only a handful of people at the SGM who were not also on the Council.
I don’t see this proposal particularly as a response to any ‘large structural problems’ the BAA may face (if indeed it does). As I wrote in the December Journal, this is part of a package of changes designed to to achieve:
-An administratively simpler subscriptions structure;
-Fairness across the various age groups;
-No reduction in the Association’s income;
-An easy and recognised route for those who wish to contribute more to do so.I still believe they do this.
The age profile of the BAA is a separate issue, and I wrote about this earlier on this thread, and on the thread about schools’ affiliation. Suffice it to say here that the SPA (mentioned in this thread by Alan Thomas) also now has a much older average age than it had in previous decades. I’m not sure that this means that either society is not sustainable in the long term. An older age profile than at a certain point in the past does not equal ‘dying out’.
The complexity of administration that Andy alludes to is very much the point here, and very much in the thinking of the Working Group that recommended this package of changes, and also in the considerations of the Trustees and Council, who have discussed this several times in the last year. The income aspect is quite significant, as this is around 10% of the membership that is paying no subs, but also what needs to be considered is paying for the staff time to administer a complex system. That’s primarily what we are trying to grapple with. Also very apparent, as Andy mentioned, is the lack of volunteers, that means paid staff must do ever more tasks to run the Association.
Some have asked that we honour 50 discontinuous years of membership rather than only 50 continuous years. I cannot imagine how that could possibly work. Membership data over the years has been held on several different systems, manual and computerised. The current on-line database only goes back a few years. People who have lapsed then rejoined probably have multiple membership numbers. Marrying this information up, where people change numbers, addresses and even names, to prove whether someone has or has not subscribed to the BAA discontinuously for 50 years, would be an administrative nightmare. Maintaining the system we have is bad enough!
Though I can see how people who expected to reach honorary status soon might feel a bit disappointed, I must say I struggle to understand some of the solutions that have been proposed here. ‘Honorary’ means unpaid, free. That’s what the word means, and what we are considering here: whether or not to continue to give free membership to those who achieve 50 years continuous membership. Abolishing the honorary membership does not mean not honouring those members who reach this milestone, whether it be by publishing their names in the Journal, congratulating them in a meeting, or giving them a certificate or a badge (though I’m not sure if the cocoa thing was a joke or not).
I hope plenty of people come to the SGM in January. Last January only between 30 and 40 people attended the meeting, as I recall, about half of those, Council members. Not all Council members attend the London meetings, as some are in remote corners of the UK, but they can still participate and vote in Council meetings by Zoom. However, ordinary members cannot vote in a meeting remotely, they have to be present. This raises the possibility in my mind that a vote in Council could be overturned in the SGM by a smaller and less representative selection of the membership than voted in Council. This would be very unsatisfactory. But if plenty of people turn up to the SGM, there is no such issue.
It might be better for the actual IAU to have an amateur branch, thus using the administrative resources they already have, and not setting up an entirely new organisation. I have had some contact with the IAU Assistant General Secretary, who is British. A problem with the ‘amateur IAU’ idea today is that this might be seen to cut-across the IAU’s new, and major, Citizen Science agenda. ‘Citizen Science’ was not a term that existed in the 1960s-80s. The landscape has changed.
