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Hi Mike,
The Radio Astronomy Group holds lots of online meetings. They have their own page where they list them all.
https://britastro.org/section_information_/radio-astronomy-section-overview/razoom-programme
It could be useful for someone to add these to the main events page. Each meeting takes a bit of work to setup, so it is a non-trivial task to set them all up and maintain them. There is also a minor issue that as there are so many, setting them up would knock some other upcoming meetings off the list on the homepage. Something for the Web Ops Group to think about.
Best wishes,
AndyOh dear, that was really nasty accident. I hope you fully recover soon Mel.
My current observatory has an electrically driven roof. I used to have a manual one that was a real struggle and I had to get onto a bench to close it. I worried about having an accident in the night!He will be very greatly missed. I had known Roger for over 20 years. I first met him at a BAA Exhibition Meeting in Cambridge, which led to my involvement in the VSS. He did a huge amount for variable star astronomy and the BAA.
Hi Duncan,
As Gary has alluded to, you need the fainter symbol in front of both the light estimate and the magnitude, so [P and [8.4.
With normal magnitude estimates an “=” is assumed, so just 8.4 means equals 8.4.
This is all to do with the way the database verifies the data, and can recalculate magnitudes when a sequence is updated.
Best wishes,
AndyHi Andy,
I have just started my Christmas holiday, so I am not sure we will get this fixed until next year. I can see roughly what has happened, though it is a little involved.
I can see you have a family membership. However, you are both the main family member, and a second copy of you is set as the other family member, with the same email address. This could be confusing the systems and causing things to go wrong. It looks as though changes were made around July this year via the Sheep online account. Without giving out personal details on the forum, I wonder if the other family member may have originally been someone else, perhaps your wife.
To fix this we will either need to reset you back to 2 different people in your family membership, or delete the other copy of you. We might also need to delete your website account, and get you to set up a fresh one, but we will only do that if the first step does not fix this.
To avoid putting personal data on the forum, I suggest we contact each other away from the forum. I will send you an email to the address we hold on the system.
Best wishes,
Andy (BAA Systems Manager)The plan is for the BAA to continue to have Affiliated Societies. However, they would not be a paid type of membership that receives the Journal.
Depending on how this is handled, this could open up Affiliated Societies status to more societies.
On a related topic, the BAA also has a library category of membership. Unless an individual joins to share the Journal, this might be a way to separate Affiliated Society status from paid membership while giving a route to receive the Journal.
I would like to make the observation that the BAA has a habit of gradually making the administration more complex with time. The Honorary and Digital Honorary paid would be another two categories, as there was no plan to ask existing Honorary and Digital Honorary to start paying. The Paper Honorary paid would have 3 membership categories behind the scenes for UK, Europe and Rest of the World postal charges. The membership types have to be coded into some of the IT systems, as well as manually maintained in several places.
I absolutely agree the achievement of 50 years membership should be recognised. This was the thinking behind the certificate. Gary makes the interesting suggestion of a gold lapel badge.
I am not suggesting this should be the deciding factor, but a factor worth considering in whatever is decided.
Michael,
I can answer some but not all of your questions.
1) Honorary means free paper subscription. Hard copies of the Journal and Handbook posted to the Honorary member.
2) This year we have added a page to the website about donations and legacies. We decided to keep it simple as we did not want to offer legal advice.
https://britastro.org/donations
We have also added some wording to encourage legacies to the renewal emails. Trying to be very delicate in how we approach this. The legacies do make a major contribution to the Association, basically meaning the subscription rate can be about half of what it takes to run the Association. We would either need to do a lot less, or otherwise have much higher subscriptions, without these generous donations.
I don’t have any hard figures as to the actual legacies received, though I think there is a small number each year, with a large legacy every few years.
I agree a debate like this is an excellent sign of a healthy Association. As indicated by David these are proposals. They have been through lots of internal discussions and by no means just the Trustees. They are not decisions until voted in, out or changed at the SGM. So Honorary membership at 50 years may continue indefinitely, or maybe leave it open for another 5 or 10 years, rather than a year and a half form now.
Best wishes,
AndyA little off topic.
If you look at the published accounts from 2018 to 2023, then the cost of running the BAA has gone from £201,790 in 2018 to £259,468 in 2023, a 28.5% increase. This compares to very roughly 22-25% inflation from a calculator I found on the Bank of England website.
I do think the cost of running the BAA is slowly rising due to the difficulty in finding volunteers. There are tasks that were done by volunteers a decade or more ago, which we now pay people to do as volunteers could not be found.I wanted to reply to the following suggestion from Lars Lindhard on the Honary membership forum thread. Here is what Lars said.
“Instead of deleting the associations from the membership list, perhaps BAA should create advantageous membership offers for club members, so that we could get more younger people into the organization that way.”
A discount on the membership fee for members of Affiliated Societies is an interesting idea. Noting that Affiliated Societies are not being removed. The proposal is to change the meaning of being Affiliated. So it might be something to consider in more detail, especially with regard to increasing the number of younger members, where younger only means below 50 years old!
Lars makes very good points. The reasons behind the age demographic are likely complex and any change to membership structure won’t fix it, but it could be one small factor.
Lars makes an interesting suggestion on Affiliated Societies. I hope Lars won’t mind if I copy his wording and reply in the forum thread on Affiliated Societies.Someone did actually make this suggestion before the proposals were put together. The problem is a gradually changing membership fee would be complex to implement.
Another factor behind this and other changes is the complexity of the existing BAA membership structure. There are currently 16 categories of membership, that split into 26 categories for administration purposes with the overseas rates. The configurations of these different membership types leads to a lot of behind the scenes complexity, both for staff and the IT systems. We get them working, but it has led to a variety of mistakes and complaints, as well as expense to get things fixed. This is not the primary reason behind this and other proposed changes, but the complexity of running the BAA is a consideration.
The proposed change to how Affiliated Societies work would potentially open this up to more Societies. The ‘free’ items will be things like being able to include an affiliated to the BAA logo, articles about the Societies in the Journal, and possibly a discount on events and the shop.
In the year to 31st March 2023, the BAA spent £259,467, with an income of £132,632. The net reduction to the BAA cash and investments was £140,976, while I expect other years will see increases as long as we continue to receive legacies.
I see every indication the BAA takes great care of its finances. The reason the BAA spends so much is because it is a very busy Association. There are the Journal and Handbook, meetings and events of various kinds, the website, archives and a lot of smaller items on the accounts.
I should emphasize, the ending of new Honorary members is part of a proposal to rebalance how the subscription income is paid over time, not to change the total subscription revenue, which is reviewed by the Treasurer each year.
This is intended as a discussion, so maybe retaining Honorary members is the right thing. However, my opinion is it is a good idea to rebalance the membership structure. Related to this, only around 5% of BAA members are under 50.
These are from the total figures in the accounts available on the website.
https://britastro.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/BAA-2023-Financial-Statements.pdf
My point was we cannot entirely rely on the reserves. Some years they will go up and other years they go down.
The underlying goal here is to try to reach a fairer subscription level across the age groups.Hi Tony,
The point of the consultation is to ask member opinions before a final decision is made.
While the BAA has good reserves, the annual expenditure is a bit over twice the income received in subscription revenue. The shortfall is made up from legacies and taking money out of the BAA’s investments and bank accounts. The value of the investments and bank reserves fell by just under 10% from 2022 to 2023, a little over the amount that was removed to cover the shortfall in operating costs.
To reach a target revenue from the membership subscriptions, the non-Honorary members have to pay a higher membership price. Around 10% of the membership are Honorary members.
The idea is to send members a certificate to commemorate the achievement of reaching 50 years of membership. Any existing Honorary members will remain as Honorary.
Best wishes,
AndyWe have received another query about how to purchase the calendar on the website. It is available in the BAA online shop:
Publications -> Buy
You can get to it directly from this link:
https://britishastro.square.site/product/baa-2024-astronomical-calendar/23
Andy
