Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I have removed the post from someone attempting to spam the forum and hopefully blocked them from trying this again. It has been reported to the website developer to see if something can be done to prevent this in future.
AndyBut ‘Astronomy Now’ are advertising the 2004 BAA Deep Sky section annual meeting…!!! It must have been a good one.
Astronomy Now, February 2024 page. 69.Ha! This happens to all of us.
I am not sure if the post was updated, but along those lines I updated a 2024 meeting today when someone pointed out the text within the webpage stated 2023.
Might it have been the thread on the BAA song? That mentions the February Journal from 1924 rather than 2024.
Both the Celestron Origin and Unistellar eVscope 2 are advertised at around £4,000. A lot more than the ZWO SeeStar S50 and DWARF II which are just over £500. Not too surprising given the Celestron and Unistellar have significantly larger apertures.
The Celestron Origin is another interesting entrant to the market. I wonder if they might offer a B&W version of the camera in future as it has a filter drawer. The filter is for light pollution filters.
Richard Berry is trying the Origin out for variable star photometry. There is the opportunity to use the green channel as with DSLRs, or all the light, depending on the goal of the observation.
The HOYS Citizen Science Project are accepting observations from ZWO Seestar 50mm telescopes, these use a colour CMOS chip. This is a research project run by Dirk Froebrich at the University of Kent, to monitor young stars.
Both of these approaches use the raw files saved by these smart-telescopes, rather than the processed images displayed on smartphones and tablets.
AndyI found Mark Stuart’s “Exploring the cosmic tapestry” very entertaining. Chris Lee’s talk on Electronically Assisted Astronomy wetted my appetite for giving this a go. I like the idea of a telescope that can be quickly and easily setup and controlled from indoors.
AndyYou can contact a member by clicking their name/image next to their forum post. This takes you to their profile page and then you can press “Contact” in the lower left.
This sends an email, so it enables contact without sharing email addresses publicly.
Cheers,
AndyHi 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.
