Inaugural Observing Evening 22nd November.

[doug]

     As you know, the first Observing evening at Otford (using the Hall) will be on the 22nd November. I would very much appreciate members coming along with their scopes as the response could be very good and we need members to perhaps demonstrate them to the unsuspecting public if the sky is clear, and if not, show people how they work in the hall.

     We need to make this Observing evening work for the future evenings there, so please try and support us in this new venture. If it takes off with a good showing from the public arena, it could mean an increase in our membership which would be a good thing as we now have a new venue...

     Once again, please try and come along.

     Thanks, Doug.

[Carole]

You've done a lot of work to get this off the ground Doug.

I will be there.  If any-one has a Canon DSLR (preferably modded) and cable to laptop, can they bring it along and say so on here, I have suggested Doug takes along my Skytracker so we can try to capture the Milky way, but as most of you know my DSLR has died and the cable is still with Mark in the camera box (I think).

Doug has also suggested giving out the old calendars that I was going to dump to any public that turn up which I think is a good idea too.

Carole 

[doug]

     I will bring the iOptron, Carole, with my Sony a180, which you can fir onto the mount.

     Doug.

[Carole]

I don't have any software to capture with the Sony Doug, do you have the capability to do say 30sec exposure on your Sony and save to the SD card?  We'll have to do quite a few shots and stack them.

Carole

[Ivor]

I'll be bringing along a couple of Canon cameras so I'm sure we can work something out.

I think it will be great to have a variety of basic kit on display and potentually in use, however it will be important to have some structure to the evening to ensure we have the balance between informal and informative without overloading any potential new members and current members.

Doug, I'll give you a call later to discuss, so we can be prepared and successful.

[Carole]

There was some discussion on Streetlife this week about the Supermoon.  (In case you don't know what Streetlife is, it is a local discussion group - I think they are all over the country where locals can discuss various issues, how to get things done, things for sale etc).  Anyway a thread was started on the Supermoon, so I went into the discussion and talked about looking at the Moon first and last quarter rather than when it's a full Moon and uploaded a couple of photos to demonstrate the differences.  Anyway, a man came back and asked if there was a local group he could take his 11 year old son to and then I replied about OAS and mentioned the meetings, camps and the Observing evening at Otford.

Upshot, probably the man and his son will come along to OAS at some point, and then a lady called Andrea picked up on the discussion and said she would like to come to Otford.

So might get some new members through that.

Carole

[Ivor]

Thanks for that Carole, interestingly I've replied to two people with 11yr old sons contact us via the website this week who plan to come down, so fingers crossed.

[Carole]

I wonder if one of them was the same as mine.  His name was Vinod.

Carole

[Roy]

Sorry about the delay in replying, we will be bringing both our observing and imaging kit. For information, our imaging kit is based on using a modified Canon DSLR on a refractor.

Roy and Sue