BAS Observer March 2018

MARCH 2018 5 LED street lights and new Australian Standard The campaign to influence Brisbane City Council and Energex to select and install well-designed LED street lighting is not going well. The social media campaign has failed to ignite public interest; however, there may still be an opportunity to build awareness of the issue through the mass media. Watch this space! Our only other good opportunity to lobby on this issue and achieve change is via public comment on a new draft Australian Standard for street lighting which should be released early this year. Once this draft is released, an email will be sent to all BAS members with information on how you can make useful comment and help guide the new Standard to better recognise the interests of city residents and dark-sky believers. So, watch this space too. New tutorial video on the BAS website If you visit the BAS website and look under http://www.bas.asn.au/index.php/equipment/instructional-videos , you will find a second instructional video – and more are planned. The first video, explaining how to set up the Star Adventurer tracking mount, has had over 1200 views from all corners of the world. Now we have a second video, this one explaining how to take a range of astrophotos using a little Canon G5X camera. While this video is certainly most useful to owners of this make and model of camera, there might still be some useful information for owners of larger DSLR cameras too. Your Management Committee is working towards conducting one or more ‘Intro to Tripod Astrophotography’ evenings this year. So, please take a look at this video, dust off your camera, and get ready to delve into simple astrophotography. Telescope donation I’d like to say a very big thank-you to BAS member Dr Mark Coulthard for donating his 8-inch Newtonian telescope on a manual equatorial mount. Mark has moved on to a larger Dobsonian telescope with Argo Navis digital telescope computer and so the older ’scope is now surplus to his needs. So, thank you, Mark for making this telescope available to BAS members. The old-style manual equatorial mount can be a bit of a beast for beginner observers to master. As a result, some modifications are now being made to the mount to convert it to a simple altitude/azimuth format that is much more intuitive for beginners. The plan is to make this modified telescope a smartphone lunar- imaging setup for the general public to experiment with at our Mt Coot-tha Lookout public observing evenings. Hopefully we will have hundreds of delighted members of the public taking great images of the Moon each month. Perhaps BAS might glean a few extra gold coin donations too. If the modifications are successful, I’ll publish an updated photo of the telescope in the next edition of the BAS Observer . School night volunteers Our first school night for 2018 is scheduled for 19th April. This will be the first of many schools that have invited us to share the night sky with their students in 2018. However, the success of this public outreach program is entirely dependent upon the contribution of our BAS volunteers. I’d very much like to expand out list of volunteers so we have a larger pool of BAS members to call upon north and south of the river. At present we are particularly short of southside volunteers. If you have a telescope and you can find the Moon, you meet all the necessary criteria. If you can make it to schools on your side of the river by about 6.00 p.m. of an evening, I’d love to hear from you (please drop me an email at president@bas.asn.au ) . I’d like to have a sufficient pool of volunteers that people may only be called upon perhaps once per month, but you can certainly volunteer for extra school nights if you are keen. So please join our volunteer pool. ■