Committee Meeting – 15th September 2009

Minutes of the Committee Meeting

15th September 2008

Venue

The meeting was held at the home of John Price.

Present

• Peter Campbell-Burns
• Peter West
• John Price

Due to the low attendance it was decided that a formal committee meeting could not be held but rather an informal and broad ranging discussion of current issues affecting the Society would be undertaken. The following notes are based upon a list that Peter Campbell-Burns compiled.

Membership

Currently membership stands at 35 with 8 unpaid from last year. Peter Campbell-Burns felt that this was significantly low compared to nearly 50 some 4 years ago.   He suggested that steps needed to be taken to boast numbers large by increasing publicity.

Various views put forward in the following discussion included the point that we should not be too worried by a fall in membership since historically, over the 38 year existence of the Society its membership had always fluctuated with a low of 10 at one point. It was recognised that advertising was constantly required in order to find those in the area interested in astronomy but unaware of the Society’s existence. The need for a publicity officer was agreed.

Forthcoming Events

There was much discussion about the possibility that Dr Chris Lintott’s talk at the October meeting would attract more attendance than the capacity of the Willis Hall.  The suggestion that it should be a ticket only event whilst reasonable was felt too late to implement since publicity to the contrary is already issued. It was felt impractical to separate members from visitors in order to give priority to the former. The Hall holds 50 and 50 chairs are provided so it was felt that care was required in putting out the chairs so as to leave standing room at the back.

Peter West agreed to organise the collection of £4 from non members by setting up a table at the door. We must be careful that the capacity of the hall is not grossly exceeded because of safety issues and breaking our agreement with the hall’s letting officer.

There are a number of observing events in October

• Mytchett School, date to be decided.
• Brownies at the Aldershot Observatory on the 20th Oct.
• Scouts at Garners Field, Tilford on 24th Oct.

The Mytchett and Tilford events require telescopes and the problem of bring large models along was raised. The larger telescopes that members have are generally mounted on fixed arrangements and festooned with equipment making them very difficult to dismantle. The possibility of the Society owning a large (12inch+) telescope for the purpose of taking to observing events only was felt to be a good idea which was left in the minds of the committee for further discussion.

SAGAS

It is the Society’s turn to chair the Sagas meeting of the 16th Jan. 2010.  We also have to provide the speaker. Peter Campbell-Burns stated that he had a speaker in mind and that we also needed a chairman (likely to be John Price).

The New Website

Peter Campbell-Burns summary is reproduced below.

Web Site Update

 New site launched successfully; Richard Kacerek has done a really good job for us.

• Feedback has been very positive indeed;
• The site is quite remarkable for a small society – it is a superb showcase for the society.
• A trawl through many URLs shows we have set another standard for others to follow – but the others are catching up (I understand that GAS is soon to launch a new site, and theirs was already excellent);
• Even more dynamic content is available to make sure that there is always something new to look at (News, APOD and planning aids for observing Weather, Moon Phase);
• Approximately 100 posts to date – lots of good content and new content is being added more frequently;
• Last week saw visitors from 33 countries;
• We have seen remarkable decrease in the time it takes Google to index content (2 minutes!);
• We need to encourage more written input from members to offset the imaging bias – it could become an online newsletter;
• Little use is being made of the ‘feedback / comments’ functionality so far (except by Spammers) but it is just a matter of time;
• Future ideas to explore are:
• Use the website as part of schools outreach (a web project for pupils?)
• Potential to generate the printed newsletter directly from current content on the site;
• Possible integration with astrometry.net service (this is under investigation)
• Astrotags (a watching brief – yet to be convinced)
• Messier Challenge

… and always on the lookout for more.

Peter also presented a software application which used “astrometry” to identify and name objects contained within an astronomical image. This is an online service and registration is required. An image submitted undergoes a pattern recognition process and then compared with sky maps to name specific objects. Peter has used this system and showed his results to the meeting. More information is available from Peter.

There was discussion on the problem the committee has in arranging its meetings.  Even when a date is arranged well in advance (the end of the previous meeting) it never seems to work because so many members cannot make and it has to be cancelled.  The meeting was unable to arrive at a solution except that John Price agreed to ask Eric Grieve if he would take on the task of calling the meeting and doing the negotiating to obtain consensus on a date.

The meeting closed without agreeing a date for the next but, hopefully, in about 3 months time!

John Price