[Dawson]

Yes, you got a great deal, and I happy to have sold it too on behalf of the SHA. It will get posted today I hope. Thanks Paul.

James

[Dawson]

Mike, both of these sound interesting. You should write them up for the solar sections newsletter or the journal. I’d be interested to see pictures too.

[Dawson]

Thank you all.

Robin’s solution looks like a good solution, and after a bit of playing with the software I will spend some time playing with that. I wish I had spent more time programming as a teenager as I can see the power of Python etc, but it’s not something I would currently use often enough to retain new learning.

[Dawson]

The other thing I stumbled on, free online, is a website called ImagetoSTL: https://imagetostl.com/

It uses pixel intensity to create a 3D projection which the user can rotate, zoomin etc, really impresive. Does anyone do this kind of stuff with astro data?

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[Dawson]

Thanks Bill.

I found a picture this morning of Alan using his Scotch Mount.

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[Dawson]

Whitbys have replied to my email.

The chap is Derek Whitby who started the business in 1982. The photo is from August 1985 and was taken in the Sadlers Waklk premises, not Storm’s office.

I’ve thanked them.

Good work, thank.

James

[Dawson]

Martin, yes, defiantely Storm’s office, it looked very similar when I was there earlier this year.

I think Jeremy is on to something. I’ve emailed Whitbys. I will keep you posted. I might email John Mason and see if he recognises the chap.

James

[Dawson]

Andrew,

Dave Finnigan has a really spectacular image of Mare Marginis from 2023 which features Jansky. It’s a fairly hard crater to image. I’ve taken the liberty of making an animated gif of Dave’s image to show which crater is Jansky. I would contact Dave and see if he is happy for you to use it.

https://britastro.org/observations/observation.php?id=20231230_131753_cd0ed773ce4ed1ce

You could also email Tony Cook, the Lunar Section Director and see if he has any images of it in the BAA archives. I will add this crater to my list of things to try and observe.

Good luck with the talk.

James

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[Dawson]

I’d forgotten there is a copy of who’s who in the moon for sale too there I’d listed: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/157523120743

[Dawson]

Paul, I know you are after various editions of Norton’s which I look out for, but none so far. I’ll see what else I’ve got.

James

[Dawson]

I’ll be there with a load of secondhand books for sale, so bring your money.

James Dawson
Society for the History of Astronomy

[Dawson]

Our eastward facing camera (UK00AN) from the Nottingham Astronomical Society Observatory detected the flash amongst the clouds and Moonlight; bottom right.

• This reply was modified 3 months ago by Dawson.

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[Dawson]

Yes, apologies for hijacking. It is, I think and important, wider, BAA topic.
James

[Dawson]

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

[Dawson]

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

[Dawson]

I emailed Lunt to ask them. I’ve had a very helpful reply. The summary is:

“You cannot simply take a pressure-tuned etalon from one 60 mm and insert it into a tilt-tuned 60 mm — they are not plug-and-play. If you want pressure tuning, the safe path is a factory retrofit by Lunt, or purchasing a PT model outright.”

It is all to do with spacing, and alignment.

James

[Dawson]

It 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

[Dawson]

Thank you both. I have not been clear, sorry, I’d had two glasses of vino! I agree, a flat field calibration frame is definitely helpful for lunar imaging.

I meant should I use a field flattener, to project a flatter image on the chip when taking video for stacking of the Moon? Or again does the stacking process negate the need?

James

[Dawson]

Ian,

I’ve looked at this and it seems the max file size limit has reverted to 2MB for the time being. I’ll let the web ops team know as something needs tweaking in PHP behind the scenes.

If you reduce the size of your images to less than 2MB, it will upload.

James

• This reply was modified 5 months, 1 week ago by Dawson.

[Dawson]

What is the file type? Email me the file; I’ll send you a message.
James

[Author]

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