Welcome to the first edition of DSO for 2006. As usual the Society attended AstroFest in London in February but due to space constraints we were put in a side room with very little traffic and our sales approximately half what they have been for the last few years.
This year as already noted also marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of T.W.Webb and the Society has moved its AGM to December to mark this. It will be held again at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge on the 2nd Dec. There will be a number of talks marking Webb and hopefully by that time the Webb biography published by Gracewing Press should be out (due May). The next DSO should see a piece by Rob Carver on Webb as well.
There have been a number of interesting controversies on the net marking the visibility or otherwise of Sirius B. Historical evidence suggests that it should not be visible in amateur sized scopes for a couple of years yet but already there are many claims with relatively small telescopes to have split the pair. As usual when these have been queried people have responded in a forthright manner. It would be interesting to know if any of our experienced double stars observers (Bob?) have managed to split the pair (time to get the Northumberland out I think).
Whilst on the topic of double stars, with two books just recently published, it looks as if the long waited book by Sissy Haas from Sky Publishing should be due in May this year. We also hope to have the 2nd Volume of Mike Ropelewski’s Visual Double Star Atlas out in the first half of 2006. It is currently at the proofing stage. This would seem to be a bumper time for double star observers.
There would also appear to be a number of other new deep sky books out this year which I did not know of in time for the last magazine. Springer indicate that Wolfgang Steinicke and Rich Jakiel’s book on Galaxies should be out in December and Webb Society member and contributor Ron Buta should have a new book from Cambridge University Press (co-edited with Harold Corwin and Sten Odenwald) called The de Vaucouleurs Atlas of Galaxies, price about £70. For those long suffering people awaiting the arrival of an updated Volume 2, I will be writing a book on planetary nebulae for Springer which will include most of this material. However as with buses it appears there may be another book on planetary nebulae from Kent Wallace published by Willmann-Bell also due out late next year. Along with those books already noted it is a bumper time for books on the deep sky again. One can also hope that Willmann-Bell will bring out the long rumored Volume 3 of the Night sky Observer’s Guide.
On the web site front Tim Walker is doing an excellent job at keeping the Society’s web site up-to-date with new information. Please send him anything you feel might be included there.
Hopefully many of you will have got out and had a chance to observe, here the weather over the winter season has been very poor and certainly the first star parties of the year appear to have been washed out. This is always a difficult time for observers at northern latitudes to get their observing fix as by the end of April it never really gets dark, particularly with the dark of Moon at the end of the month in this cycle. Hopefully the rest of the year will improve so we can get some more observing articles in.
Editor: Owen Brazell