Deep-Sky Observer - DSO 196
In this issue
Observing at Kelling Heath Spring 2025 David Reynolds
The Webb Society Annual Meeting 2024 Bob Argyle
Object of the Season: Galaxy pair NGC 4038/39 in Corvus Wolfgang Steinicke
Seestar Phenomena George Sallit
Herschel Sprint Owen Brazell
Advanced Observing: Visual Mysteries of the Universe by Larry Mitchell reviewed by Owen Brazell
Review: Messier Cards by Cosmic Shards by Owen Brazell
Editorial
Welcome to DSO 196. With this magazine I have completely emptied the cupboard of articles and a number of the pieces here have been written by me. Hopefully the winter season will provide enough observing opportunities to get some new articles written. I know we are facing the same issues as many other print magazines and with limited options many people will write for those magazines that pay them. The long term survival of many astronomical associations is also in doubt as most of them are now supported by people in their late 50ʼs through to their 70ʼs. The Webb Society is in the same position with most of the committee now in their 70ʼs or approaching that point. I am pleased however to welcome Tatyana Reid on to the committee as our newest member. A discussion long ago with the historian Alan Chapman suggested that most younger people no longer see the point of formal societies as they get all their information via social media. Of course, the issue there is that this material is not proof read and they may not be getting accurate or even good information. One only has to look at the deep sky forums on Stargazers Lounge or Cloudy Nights to see where this has headed. The new generations coming through do not seem to have the depth of knowledge from the past and spend much time reinventing things, although this could perhaps be levelled at every generation. It would be interesting to hear from members which way they think the magazine and society should go. I saw that the mirror maker Karl Zambuto has retired, partly because there were no orders for large mirrors for visual observing.
The society has had a reasonably successful year with an increasing membership although yet again the number of people supporting our work at shows is becoming a limiting factor as well as finding space to store material and lug it around. I think we are primarily going to shows to keep the society in peopleʼs minds as it is difficult to make a sufficient profit to cover our costs. This is becoming particularly true for me when going to the Kelling star parties where I have to find room for the telescope etc. as well as finding space for Webb materials which means I have to leave other things out. Despite this we are going to the IAS in November 2025 and the PAS in March 2026 as well as Kelling in March 2026 so a busy time yet. I also note that the implementation of tariffs may cause issues sending materials to the US. I am not sure if books have tariffs but we will see. If we have to jump through too many hoops to get materials there, we may have to look at other solutions.
The website seems to be going well and my thanks to James Whinfrey for organising that and to Patrick Maloney and Bob Argyle for the features.
Speaking on the book front the number of deep sky books written in English seems to be decreasing. For those interested in dark nebulae there is a new book from Springer as a follow up to the book The Barnard Objects: Then and Now called the Barnard Album due for publication in December 2025, although I am guessing that as always that will slip. It can be preordered from Amazon. Ronald Stoyan and Oculum did at the last minute get enough orders for the Planetary Nebula atlas Vol 2 which is expected at the end of 2026. This will of course be in German He is looking for enough people to show interest to get an English translation of Vol 1 but is quite a way short in numbers as I write this. It is probable that the Annals of the Deep Sky Volume 12 covering Hydrus, Indus, Lacerta and Leo along with Leo Minor will be out at the end of the year with Leo covering almost half the book. The assumption is the book will be about 570 pages. As before we canʼt carry it. I note that Victor van Wulfen has added a number of excellent guides to his CSOG series of downloads at clearskies.eu covering a wide variety of his favourite reflection nebulae amongst others. Although you have to pay to register and then download this material, I think these are excellent guides and well worth going through, for instance for galaxy observers there are 16 guides and many for planetary nebula observers as well. There are rumours that Larry Mitchell is going to be looking at a fourth volume of his Visual Mysteries books to cover those parts of the year that are not in the TSP Advanced programs. It seems from looking at Amazon that many people are going into self-publishing to get works out, facilitated by Amazon and Lulu, as witnessed by the astrophotography series by Gary Imms.
The software side of the business also seems in abeyance with not a lot new coming out. There are fixes to DSP 9 but no new features and as always, I have to say that the EAA version of SkyTools seems as far away as ever. I think he has bitten off more than he can chew here as every time there is an update now something else is broken. AstroPlanner 2.4 was released but much of the changes there seemed to be for supporting imagers and most of the further developments seem to be going in the same direction. For Seestar owners it appears that there will be an ASCOM/ ALPACA interface due soon which will allow control of it from other programs, although this may already be available in the 2.6.1 release.
As a look forward the BAA DSS is planning a meeting on March 28th 2026 in Cheltenham, details from their website. We hope to be there as well with a stand. We are looking at a date in June 2026 for our Annual meeting.
Owen Brazell - Editor of The Deep-Sky Observer
