Welcome to another edition of the Deep Sky Observer. I apologise that it has been such a long time between issues but various things, not least paid work, have cropped up in the meantime. You may also notice that there are a different mix of articles in this issue. We needed to get last year’s AGM into print and the backlog of reviews sorted, so this cut down on the space available for the more technical articles.

Hopefully next issue we will be back to the normal mix, and there will not be such a long gap between issues.

On the observing front I managed to get two nights with the 20-inch at various star parties and a week at 2200 metres in Tenerife with a 24½-inch Dobsonian so there will be an article on that in a forthcoming DSO. It was interesting to see some of the mid-southern constellations like Fornax and Grus as well as to discover what is really south of Orion and Puppis. The purchase of a 130mm APO means that maybe there will be some articles on small telescope observing coming soon as well.

On the article front we are rather low again so if you have some material that you would like to share then we would be more than pleased to have it. As noted in the news section the initial growth of deep sky related websites seems to have stalled although the activity on some of the news groups is still high

Society News

The 2005 AGM was held at Aldermaston after some problems with dates and venues. Our thanks go to Steve Harris from AWE for helping out with this one. Unfortunately, despite a very good set of speakers, we had the lowest turnout (approximately 35) since the days when we met in the Royal Astronomical Society’s Fellows’ Room. It is very difficult for the society to cover costs with this kind of turnout. I did notice that other meetings in the same timeframe also had low turnouts so perhaps it is just a case of meeting exhaustion.

On the long look ahead 2006 marks the 200th anniversary of Webb’s birth and we are going to have a meeting towards the end of the year to celebrate that, probably 2nd December 2006 at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. Although the venue is not as convenient as we would like, it is free and that helps us with the costs. We also hope to tie down the speakers very soon.

We will be at the European AstroFest on 3rd and 4th February 2006 so we look forward to meeting as many members there as possible At the AGM the post of ‘Meetings Organiser’ became vacant. Stewart Moore will undertake this for the coming year but we are looking for someone else to step in to that post on a more permanent basis. There is only one meeting a year but the person will have to be pro-active in this area. Also at the Annual Meeting the question of a name change of the Society came up. The decision was taken that it should remain unchanged but there will be a new banner we can use at shows saying “Webb Deep Sky Observing Society” and we hope to register a domain name including the words ‘deep sky’ to help with Google searches.

The original webbsociety.org domain has been taken by someone else who hopes to sell it. We do not intend to enter into negotiations!

We had hoped to have the new Bennett List book out but there are some delays in getting that together. Progress is being made on the second volume of Mike Ropelewski’s book on visual double stars and it should be ready in time for AstroFest. If there is something you feel we could or ought to publish then please let Stewart know.

Now that I have a copy of the Royal Dublin Society Transactions of Lord Rosse’s observations there maybe an update at some point of the Rosse CD ... not this year though!

As this is the last issue we expect to have ready for release in 2005, may we wish all readers a Merry Christmas and Happy and Healthy New Year.