Deep-Sky Observer - DSO 194
In this issue
Extreme Sky& McNeil’s Nebula by Yann Pothier
Where is the Nearest Black Hole? by Scott Harrington
Haw Wood Star Party Nov 2023 by Owen Brazell
The Webb Society Annual Meeting Report for 17 June 2023
Extreme Sky& Shakhbazian 16 by Yann Pothier
Deep-Sky Planner 9 reviewed by Owen Brazell
Object of the Season: Reflection Nebula NGC 1788 in Orion by Wolfgang Steinicke
Editorial
The society had a very successful AGM again, unfortunately the numbers attending were somewhat down on last year. There are plans to put up a Webb YouTube channel and put the talks up on there. We are already into planning for next year, again hopefully at the IOA on June 28th 2025.
I apologise for the lack of DSO’s this year but we are rather short on material again, as usual, so hopefully you can get your writing fingers going for DSO 195. I note this now becoming a problem with both the BAA DSS and Comet sections struggling to get any material out for newsletters. I guess the world of paper has been overtaken by the forum and the Blog. This is obviously an issue going forward as the internet is quite a temporary space.
We are hoping to get GOM 2 out for next Spring. It is in the hands of Jon for the layout now. I am looking to update Vol. 5, hopefully for next year. On that note Alan Dowdell has the 16” F5 mirror that George Whiston used for that volume and is looking to donate it to anyone who could make good use of it.
I had some interesting discussions with one of our members at the recent IAS show and he felt that in the UK the era of large telescopes for visual observing is coming to an end. This would be based on the fact that it is now getting very difficult to sell telescopes over 18”/45cm aperture now. The population of visual observers is getting older and the ability to hump large telescopes around is also not getting any easier. That and the badly deteriorating skies here in the UK make it very difficult now to push the limits of your telescope. Younger people coming into the hobby are no longer interested in astronomy per-se but just imaging technology. This can be seen by the rise in smart telescopes such as the Seestar, Dwarf and Unistellar scopes. The weather here in the UK for the last few years has been uniformly awful for observing unless you have a permanent observatory and with the upcoming star party season it does not look much better.
The society is now having issues with supporting trade shows with this relying now on Steve and Anita Rayner along with myself. It is not clear how long we can continue doing this. We have had no interest in getting someone new to take over the sales side. We also have an issue with the medium term future of the society as the committee is getting older and we could really do with some new younger blood coming on to the committee. This not just an issue with the Webb Society as all of the UK national organisations appear to have the same issue. I do wonder if the 20th century was the heyday of the national society.
On the publishing side, self-published volumes via Amazon seems on the rise as seen by the Gary Imms series on imaging. Most of these books seem to be aimed at imagers now. Alvin Huey put out an interesting new volume on objects to be seen in large telescopes. I suspect that from the UK even with a large telescope the poor skies will make this hard. He has also updated many of his previous downloadable observing guides at www.faintfuzzies.com. I note that Springer has very few new books on astronomy at all coming out and none in the range of deep sky observing. It is likely that towards the end of the year Victor Van Wulfen will release his CSOG V3 from www.clearskies.eu. These normally now require a subscription to download.
On the software side there is nothing new coming out as far as I can see, certainly for visual observers. AstroPlanner 2.4 has however finally made it out the door. There are no signs of SkyTools 4.1 Visual and I suspect now a release date in 2025 and it will be mostly focused on EAA which is not really visual observing, no matter what its adherents claim. The author has suggested that it will be released like Windows 11 in small parts with an upfront update fee to access them. It appears Stellarium is now on a quarterly release cycle as 24.3 has been released at the end of September. There appears to be a new release of SkySafari 7 (7.5), certainly for iOS, with improved databases including the Abell galaxy clusters and updated NGC/IC data amongst others.
The comments on the CN forums on books appear to be becoming more banal as well. The software side of the CN forum is devoted to imaging issues as well.
Owen Brazell - Editor of The Deep-Sky Observer
