Welcome to this edition of DSO. In a slight change of direction the main article is about a
subject that has not been touched on in the magazine since 1980.
Radio astronomy is a subject normally outside our preserve but with
increasing light pollution destroying our skies perhaps other areas of the
electromagnetic spectrum are ripe to be exploited.
The next issue of DSO will return to our more traditional mix of
articles.
The editorial in the last issue of DSO has raised a
certain amount of correspondence. The
main context of that was should we merge the Webb Society publications with a
new commercial venture from the Interstellarum team.
After many discussions the committee decided against this proposition and
that decision appears to have been supported by the e-mails received.
Ron Buta’s letter published in this issue of the magazine here covers
most of the points raised.
One of the things raised at the last AGM was the
possibility of holding an international deep sky meeting hosted either in Europe
or the US. The original suggestion
was to have the first one in Europe. What
are peoples’ feelings on this? It
would be a weekend meeting, possibly held at a site where, if it was clear,
observing could be done as well.
I hope you all liked the last DSO with colour images.
We hope to do this a couple of times
a year so if you have any good colour images then please send them to myself so
we can get a good mix for the next issue.
After a period of absence we returned to UK Astrofest and
had a fairly successful time covering our costs. We had a new CD to sell as well
as the new booklet by Wolfgang Steinicke on Extragalactic Objects discovered
as Variable Stars. In terms of
the older Handbooks we are now down to only Volumes 6-8 in UK stock.
Some arm-twisting also managed to get a few lapsed members
back into the fold.
We still need to grow the membership in order to have
colour in every issue. To this end
we are looking for a member with design skills to create an advert for the
Society to put in other publications to try and raise our profile.
If anybody out there has these skills or knows of somebody who might then
please let Don Miles or Bob Argyle know.
On a similar problem we are looking for someone with the
skills to take old WordPerfect 6 files with embedded graphics and output them to
a format that we can manipulate so that we can at last get the new Volume 2
sorted out. This has been our main
problem with this volume.
We would also like to put the current visual archive onto
a CD, possibly in partnership with the BAA Deep Sky Section to produce a CD of
drawings with various size telescopes that could be sold as a guide to what deep
sky objects really look like through the telescope.
The Society offers its congratulations to member Doug
Snyder who has discovered his first comet C/2002 E2 (Snyder-Murakami).
Doug was purposely searching for comets using his 20-inch Obsession and
discovered C/2002 E2 after only 70 hours hunting.
It appears that the 20-inch Obsession is becoming the instrument of
choice for discovering comets as P/2001 Q2 (Petriew) was also discovered using
one. So much for the theory that
you need wide fields!
Editor: Owen Brazell