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In case you’re not already aware, you can find a gallery of all the images in the BAA image gallery that are tagged with ‘Eclipse’ here: https://britastro.org/observations/index.php?library=0&tagged_object=Eclipse
Best wishes,
Dominic
Hi Guys,
When you log into the BAA site, it will use a cookie to keep track of your session. So long as your browser hangs onto the cookie, you’ll stay logged in, but the instant you lose the cookie, you’ll be logged out. There will be a time-out at the BAA end, but I think it’s a long time-out.
If you’re experiencing premature log-out, I think it’s almost certainly due to cookie-blocking software / settings in your web browser which is deleting the BAA’s cookies (for example, when you change browser tab/window) to stop us tracking you.
Cheers,
Dominic
Apologies for the time it took to fix these issues.
There were some changes to the configuration of the BAA web server associated with the new bot-blocking software, which broke the image gallery.
I think it should now be completely fixed and back to normal. Please let us know if you’re still having issues.
I’ve just created an object entry for ‘Nova Sge 2026’ in the image gallery, and tagged last night’s images.
It can’t happen very often that there are two active novae at the same time, called ‘Nova Sge 2026’ and ‘Nova Sgr 2026’!
I haven’t created an entry for ‘Nova Sgr 2026’ yet as I don’t think any images have been uploaded, but I will add it if any observations appear.
As you say, I think it is very clear that the Astronomer Royal has a conflict of interest as the Chair of the STFC panel which took this decision. Plenty of professional astronomers feel the same way.
What more evidence is needed, than the way the Astronomer Royal for Scotland has been doing all the media interviews in defence of Jodrell, while the Astronomer Royal for England has stayed quiet? Last time I checked, Cheshire was in England.
I doubt that the BAA holds much sway on this issue, or that His Majesty has much inclination to intervene. But publicly drawing attention to the conflict of interest, and the way England’s Astronomer Royal is currently AWOL, can’t do any harm.
As far as I know, there isn’t any such repository. We have discussed setting one up in the past, but unfortunately it’s always been one of those lovely ideas which is really hard to put into practice.
Many of the people who give really good PowerPoint presentations are very reluctant to share their slides in an editable format. This is understandable because of the risk that other people will then introduce content that the original author does not condone, and then redistribute the slides with the original author’s name appearing to be associated with some nonsense about supermoons.
The other big issue here is copyright. Basically, all outreach presentations will have images whose copyright is owned by the original observers. Your average local society will typically operate on the basis that nobody is going to complain about their images appearing in a talk – but as soon as you start distributing the slides online, you are redistributing people’s work and clearly need consent to do that. Within the BAA this is managed through our T&Cs, which say that any images submitted to sections or online can be reproduced in any BAA publications, but that does not extend to inviting local societies to edit and reuse the images and share them online.
Sorry if that all sounds very negative!
Hi Alan et al.,
Many apologies that this took so long. The autumn was a bit unexpectedly busy.
I’m glad to say that the 15 Palomar globular clusters are now in the object catalogue, and I have already gone through and hopefully tagged all of your images appropriately.
A minor technical detail: these catalogue entries are currently stub entries without metadata such as sky positions and magnitudes, but this data should get populated in due course, next time a do a full update of the object catalogue. For now, you’re unlikely to notice that anything is missing.
Best wishes,
Dominic
Random guess: is this due to backlash? RA always moves in the same direction, so you can avoid backlash by always approaching targets from the east. The Moon’s declination moves in both directions, so there would be no way to completely avoid backlash.
Hi James,
I fear this isn’t the answer you’re looking for, but this is the kind of task that is very easy in Python:
from PIL import Image im = Image.open("my_image.tif") pixels = list(im.getdata()) width, height = im.size pixels = [pixels for i in xrange(height)]You can then do whatever you like with your giant array of pixel values. The
numpymodule already has lots of statistical tools available for immediate use, so your final Python script might be fewer than ten lines of code.The BAA forum has removed a set of brackets from the last line of the code snippet above and I can’t work out how to fix it, but you should get the idea nonetheless…
Best wishes,
Dominic
Well said, Nick.
I would suggest that anyone who’s interested in this start out by reading Diarmaid Macculloch’s History of Christianity – an excellent book written by a preeminent historian. In summary, there are plenty of things in the Bible which are well-evidenced, but the Christmas story is unfortunately not one of them.
Unfortunately for Matthew, the Romans were highly efficient at keeping records and distributing them widely across the Empire. The idea that Caesar Augustus might have decided to tax the whole world and then destroyed all trace of the paperwork is almost as laughable as the idea that he was remotely interested in Joseph’s ancestry in Bethlehem. So, it’s probably best to take that star with a pinch of salt.
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
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.
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
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 for reporting this – the web server settings had been reset during a software update. I think this should now be fixed. Please let me know if not.
Hi Alan,
Thanks for posting these images – and well done on completing your observing project!
Currently I seem to release updates to the image gallery object database roughly once per year – with the exception of comets, which automatically get added when they first appear in the Comet Section archives. It’s about a year since I last added a bunch of extra deep sky catalogues, so it’s probably about time to think about a new update.
The criteria I generally use to decide which catalogues to add is to look through the list of untagged images, and see which catalogues are easily available for download from reliable online sources like CDS / Vizier.
As it happens, the Palomar catalogue is already my top priority for the next update.
It won’t happen right away, but perhaps by the end of the summer.
Best wishes,
Dominic
Hi all,
We’ve discussed this, and agreed to increase the maximum allowed file size from 3MB to 10MB.
Enjoy!
Dominic
I absolutely agree with Mark Phillips above – people are looking up, and that’s a great outcome in itself.
In the 15 minutes after the feature on the BBC news, there was a marked spike in traffic to the BAA website, even though the BAA homepage didn’t have much to offer beginners wanting to find the planets.
I think Catherine Heymans’ approach is spot on… “Hey, you’re looking for the planetary parade? That’s great – there are lots of planets to see right now. This is how you can see them. By the way, you don’t have a hope of seeing Saturn, but let’s not worry about that – Jupiter and Mars are pretty great”.
Hi James,
While I can’t give you a definite answer (I suspect this isn’t documented anywhere), I would expect a DSLR to do a very good job of what you’re proposing. I would expect that the camera is doing intelligent downsampling and interpolation in silicon.
As I understand it, camera manufacturers see wannabe YouTubers who film themselves in dingy conditions as a huge market, and so they’re anxious to do low-light low-noise video well. They certainly wouldn’t be throwing data away. Thankfully for us astronomers, those are exactly the same requirements we have.
For what it’s worth, my partner has recently dragged me into filming ballet performances where the lighting is also sometimes far from ideal. I’ve been staggered by the video footage my Canon RP (and previously, 750D) can get of high-velocity dancers with hardly any light. By comparison, my Panasonic camcorder really struggles in low-light conditions.
Good luck,
Dominic
Very sorry to hear this – especially as I never got the chance to meet Storm.
It’s less than six months since Wil Tirion’s passing – the other half of the partnership that worked on the “Guide to the Night Sky”.
As it happens, I was contacted by the Guide’s publisher last summer, asking me to help prepare the 2026 edition. Helping with it has been an enormous amount of work over the past six months, and has really made me appreciate how much work Storm and Wil put into it every year. The 2026 Guide should finally be passed over to the typesetters in a couple of weeks, at which point I can breathe a sigh of relief. Back in the day, Wil would have gone on to typeset the whole manuscript and submitted it to the printers in camera-ready form.
