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To answer James’s question, members will have the opportunity in the meeting to propose amendments to the proposed By-laws, so they could vote to accept parts of the proposals but reject other parts.
David Arditti
PresidentI can answer these questions Alan.
It is not usual in this day and age for large membership charities to allow their members to vote on subscription levels. For example, when did the National Trust or the RSGB last ask their members to vote on their subscription levels? In practice only a tiny proportion of the BAA membership votes on the subscription levels: last year, only about 30 members attended the SGM, of whom about 15 were on the Council. It’s not a representative sample. It seems to me, and the rest of the Trustees and Council, that it is part of the proper job of the Trustees, for which they are elected, to look at the Association’s finances including income and expenditure, reserves, investments etc. and to decide what the appropriate levels for subscriptions are. The fact that, under the proposals, there will be a vote on subscription levels by the Council, creates a check on the Trustees’ decision and subjects it to further discussion within the Association. Another point is that, following the recommendations of the Subscriptions Strategy Working Group, we will be introducing a higher tier of subscription called a ‘Benefactor’ subscription for those who wish to contribute more than the standard subscription. There’s no reason why the general membership should take a view on the appropriate level of such a voluntary contribution.
In the 2023 ballot we had 477 digital ballots and 56 paper ballots completed, so only 9.5% of the ballots were paper returns. Both the digital ballot and the paper ballot cost us about £1000 to run (so £2000 total). So the paper votes are costing us £20 each. The Trustees have not taken the decision to cease the paper ballot, but we’d like the authority of the members to do so if we feel it is just not a sensible expenditure. We may also look into the costs and practicality of sending paper ballot papers to only the members for whom we do not hold email addresses, so as not to disenfranchise them.
The proposed change to affiliated societies is to remove them as a category of membership. This recommendation also comes out of the Subscriptions Strategy Working Group. If enacted, affiliated societies would no longer pay a fee to the BAA and they would no longer get one copy of each issue of the Journal and one copy of the Handbook. However they would still be affiliated to the BAA and their members would still be welcome at BAA meetings.
David Arditti, President
Sounds 100% like a scam to me. I don’t know how it works, but one clue is that $2000 for an astronomical image is far too much. When I’ve had images published in books, the payment has been in the £10s range, never more than £100.
David
I can recommend Olly Penrice’s place in the south of France. He is is an astro-imaging specialist: https://www.sunstarfrance.com
The best location in the south of the UK I have found is Llanerchindda Farm, run by the Hadley Family in mid-Wales. They don’t have much equipment there (they have a 6″ Dob) and they are not astronomy specialists, but they are very helpful. https://cambrianway.com
Yes, though I am surprised your flat frames need to be exposed for so long. I use a twilight sky and the exposures are less than 0.1s.
I agree with Ian Sharp’s answer. There’s no need for bias frames. A better solution is the combination of dark frames of length and temperature equal to that of the light frames, flat frames specific to the optical setup and filter, and dark flat frames of length equal to the flat frames. I think this is better for all sensor types.
To provide a conclusion to this topic, I can report that the BAA Council discussed the proposal that the ballot should not be held in years when no positions are contested. They voted by a large majority to retain the current system of holding a ballot every year.
However, we will shortly be bringing forward proposals to amend the By-laws so as to give the Board of Trustees explicit authority to hold only an on-line ballot, without the postal one, if they decide this is appropriate. This would considerably reduce the costs of holding our elections.
David Arditti
PresidentHaving consulted with the Office and Journal Editor, who has spoken to the printer, the consensus of opinion is that what has gone wrong is that copies have escaped from the compostable plastic wrappers in the post, because of the extra weight of the Handbook, and have got lost, or been repackaged and not yet delivered.
We have told the printer to revert to using paper wrappers. We hope this will solve the problem.
Paul, Alan and Roy should get theirs direct from the Office shortly.
It is decimals of a minute. So e.g. 10:47.7 is 10:47 and 7/10 of a minute, which is 42 seconds.
Some software packages used in astronomy produce this output.
I observe Jupiter a lot and use the WinJupos package by Grischa Hahn, and that gives everything in decimals of a minute. So also every piece of software that feeds into this (e.g. the image capture software) has to use that time format as well. In this case I think the reason is just historical, that visual observations could not be accurate to better than this, and in early days of programming it was easier to do it this way, and it has carried on. I don’t really like it.
Occultations of course can be timed to at least a tenth of a second, but I suppose the prediction does not need to be so accurate, so I suspect this is really due to both trying to save space (in print) and software that is a bit long in the tooth.
But someone who works with occultation predictions might care to comment.
Sorry to hear about this.
I don’t know it there is a systemic problem here, but as there are three of you, it sounds as if we need to take this up with the printer, who sends them out directly from the print works.
In the short term I’ll let the BAA Office know that you are missing your October Journals, and they should be able to send you copies from their stock.
David
PresidentThe full financial statement is now available to members here:
https://britastro.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/BAA-2023-Financial-Statements.pdf
Sorry for the delay.The financial statement published in the Journal is an abbreviated version of the full financial statement which should be published on the website. I have just looked for it and found it has not yet been published. My apologies for this oversight, and thanks for bringing this to my attention. I will see that it is fixed shortly.
The full financial statement has this paragraph on page 21, which answers your question:
‘The British Astronomical Association has been notified of a will in which they are beneficiary. However this is currently being contested. The charity will be liable for the advice in arriving at a decision. The cost of the legal fees to settle this case may be deducted from the estate or may be awarded against the Association. To date, approximately £30,000 of costs have been incurred by the Association and further costs of up to £70,000 could be expected.’
As you will be aware, the Trustees are elected by the members to manage the assets of the Association. They keep this case, and expenditure on it, constantly under review. They believe it is highly likely that the BAA will win this case and these costs will be recovered, plus more. However, it is our duty to tell the members that there is a chance that the case could be lost and the costs could be awarded against the Association.
You would be, of course, quite at liberty to ask questions on this at the AGM. The case of the Roy Panther estate is in the public domain, and has been widely reported.
David Arditti, President
Indeed the question as posed is unanswerable.
Telescopes are used to take images in two basic ways (not counting spectroscopy):
1. To image faint objects
2. To image fine detail
(3. Some combination of these)Aperture allows you to resolve detail, but focal length allows you to image the resolved detail with a detector. Aperture also allows you to image faint stars, but the imaging of faint extended objects depends inversely on focal ratio. Width of field, with a given detector, depends inversely on focal length. If you wish to image the combination of faint stars, faint extended objects, and detail, you require a large aperture at a low focal ratio. If you wish to image wide fields you need a short focal length, but unless you have a large aperture and hence a low focal ratio as well, your detection of faint objects and your resolution will be limited. But there is a limit to how low focal ratio can go without optical problems, so for the widest fields, very small telescopes are needed, which are limited in both resolution and limiting magnitude.
This is all before one gets into considerations of mounts and drives.
So what is ‘a good telescope for astrophotography’ depends on what exactly you are trying to achieve.
If the main problem is backlash in dec. you could try only guiding in RA. It is one of the options. You may be able to get long enough out of it.
If the star is wandering in RA, and the communications are all working, the possibilities are that the star is not bright enough, so the SNR is too low, or that the errors in the drive are just too large and random to allow guiding to work. I have this issue with my ancient Fullerscopes Mk.IV mount.
You haven’t actually explained what your problem is Jack. What results have you been getting from your attempts to use PhD2 so far? What is the guiding instrument? Have you succeeded in calibrating the system? Have you found suitable guide stars? What happens when you try to guide on them?
In my experience PhD2 either works or it doesn’t work with a system, and if it doesn’t, there’s some fundamental hardware problem that no changes to the default settings will make any difference to.
The first step is to enter the guiding focal length and pixel size. PhD then calculates appropriate increments for the movements. It should then be possible to do a calibration using a star. If that is successful, then it should guide.
Problems are pretty much always problems with the hardware rather than with PhD’s settings.
I would not rule out the possibility that your 1.25″ Lunt solar wedge is sub-par. I don’t have experience with this unit, but I do have experience with the Lunt 1.25″ diagonal blocking filter units for H alpha telescopes. I tried two, the B600 6mm one and the B1200 12mm one. On the same telescope, the 12mm one was clearly better. However, and this is where I get to my point, I tried a home-brew experiment (that I do not recommend to anyone who does not know what they are doing) where I pulled the 12mm blocking filter out of the 1.25″ diagonal (it was glued in) and made (on a lathe) a straight tube unit of 2″ outer diameter to house it, and a 1.25″ eyepiece tube. I was then able to use my H alpha system with a 2″ diagonal. The result was clearly better. There was therefore definitely a quality difference between the 2″ diagonal I had substituted and both Lunt 1.25″ diagonals, that was perceptible even in typical poor daytime seeing conditions. The Lunt diagonals did not seem good when one pulled them apart – well-finished outside, weighty, but just crudely glued together inside, unlikely to be precise. One experience.
Here’s a picture taken afterwards, at the doors of the National Museum of Wales: from right, Hazel Collett, Graham Collett, Graham Winstanley, Mike ?
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