Welcome to another issue of DSO. Those of you who subscribe to the Webb Soc mailing list will have noted a fairly heated exchange over the naming of the society and the direction it seems to be going. The underlying premise seems to be that the society is asking for ideas for change but then ignoring the input, i.e. we would like change as long as nothing changes. As noted during the exchange nothing could be further form the truth. We have tried over the years to bring new things to the table. These will of course reflect the interests of the committee and anyone who would like to bring something new is welcome onto the committee. It is to be noted that all the committee members are unpaid and have real jobs so if you have a new idea please bring it forward to the committee but be prepared to help implement it as well.
On of the long standing complaints has been that we do not have enough articles for observers with small telescopes. This is not a policy, it just reflects what material I get to publish. I have noted that Sky and Telescope appears to have dropped its columns on deep sky observing with larger telescopes and concentrated on Sue French’s column aimed at smaller telescope users. This of course reflects the vast rise in small high quality telescopes being bought. There have been a number of online surveys of late to try and determine what small, medium, large and very large telescopes mean to people and the results have been reasonably consistent in that small appears to be up to 15cm (6 inches), medium from 15cm to 35cm (14 inch), and large from 35-50 cm (20 inch) and huge, larger than that! There appears even in the UK to be a growing population of telescopes at the huge end but interestingly there is also a growing population of high end apochromatic refractors in the small end. This along with a growing interest in double star observing (witness two books on double star observing from Springer, the best of course by Bob Argyle J). This along with the interest on the newsgroups suggests that double star observing may be on the rise. Lets see if this increases the number of double star measures that Bob gets. The quality of these instruments also means that objects hitherto thought to be only in the range of larger instruments have come to portable telescopes as well. I was surprised to see the Veil using an OIII filter from my back garden with an 80mm Williams APO, although I know that Peter Hudson has seen it with smaller binoculars. Recent observations of Abell 21 by Steve Gottlieb using his 80mm finderscope also suggest that people should try for some of the fainter objects again.
Another challenge that seems to have come up is to try and see how many stars you can see in the Trapezium in Orion with a small telescope. The usual candidates are E and F. How many people have seen G and H and with what size telescopes? There have been some good finder charts published on the web. If any one is interested in trying this then drop me an e-mail and I can let you have a chart as a .jpg file.
Society News
The society had a successful AstroFest, although not as good as last year. The new postcard series was very well received. The Herschel CD also sold well on its first time out, although we did sell more at the BAA Deep Sky Section meeting. During the year the society hopes to bring out Volume 2 of the popular Visual Double Star Atlas concentrating on southern constellations. Also on the lists is a book on the Bennett list by Jenni Kay and Magdha Streicher. The Bennett list was a list of fine southern objects that Jack Bennett, the noted South African comet observer put together so that southern observers would have their own Messier list. Also on the lists is a version of the PN handbook concentrating on the NGC/IC planetaries. We hope finally to have that out for AstroFest next year. Anyone who is prepared to help Don with the layout of these publications will be most gratefully accepted.
Editor: Owen Brazell