2024 was a busy year for Cranborne Chase Astronomy Club and this was in all the right directions and for the right reasons. As proposed in 2023 we have extended our outreach to other clubs, participated in a number of local events and organised an astronomy evening in a local school.
Membership has increased over the course of the year from 31 to 40, with an average attendance of 30 at our talks.
As regards those talks, from the beginning of the year we moved our venue for these to the Grosvenor Arms Hotel in Shaftesbury, who generously offered us their rather splendid Assembly Room at no cost, enormously helping our budget for this year. The Grosvenor is seeking planning permission to convert the Assembly Room bedrooms, but there has been a stay of execution on this until at least June of 2025. We may be looking for different accommodation after that so if anyone has ideas for a good venue they know, please tell us.
Observation evenings have been hampered by the weather, especially in the second half of the year, but the substitute sessions which we organised have all been very successful, as have our two telescope workshops and the programme of talks.
Observation evenings were scheduled during the year for 14 February, 8 May, and 9 October. None of these were able to take place due to poor viewing conditions, but substituting indoor sessions at the Grosvenor was found to work well; the corresponding inside events on those three dates were:
In addition, impromptu observations outside the scheduled programme through the “Blue Flag” alert on WhatsApp also came into play on a number of occasions.
On 18 January about a dozen observers gathered at Duncliffe Woods. In some ways Duncliffe Woods is more accessible than Win Green so we may give that venue another try sometime. You can read the amusing AI-generated report of that evening on the website.
Impromptu observations also happened around the dates of the Perseid meteor shower in August. Groups were up on Win Green between the 9th and 11th. 17 observers turned up on the night of the peak and by 1 am we had observed about two dozen meteors. Not quite as many as we were hoping, perhaps, but one brave soul stayed up there until 4am and was able to bag a total of over 40. There were two further “blue flag” impromptu sessions at Win Green on 11 September and 20 November.
Over the course of the year we’ve made contact with other astronomy clubs in the area, attending talks – either in person or via zoom – at Fordingbridge, Wessex (based in Wimborne) and Weymouth Clubs so, in a way, extending our talks offer to our members, both in terms of quantity and quality, such as, for example, Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell speaking to the Wessex club in Wimborne on pulsars, and Bud Budzinksy on Galileo at Wessex, who we later invited to give an entertaining talk to us on how he makes his own telescopes. We now include details of speakers at other clubs when he sends out our own monthly talk announcement, so I recommend members try to follow some of these up in person or on zoom.
Members of the Club also participated in a number of outside astronomy-related events: the Cerne Abbas Star Party over the weekend 7 - 8 September; half a dozen of us attended this event – some hardy individuals camping there over the full weekend - where again there were excellent speakers and observation opportunities. Wessex Astronomy Society put on a “Starfest” in March, an exhibition of astronomy at the Allendale Centre in Wimborne. It was aimed mainly at children but was an interesting display of astronomical material. We had hoped to join Fordingbridge in their Messier Challenge in March, but that didn’t work out this year; we may be more successful in joining them next year, or even set up our own in March 2025. Finally, I must mention our own very successful interclub astronomy quiz at the Rising Sun in June. Building on our quiz for our own members in 2023 there was a friendly competition this year between ourselves and teams from Fordingbridge and Wessex Astronomers. Fordingbridge won the challenge.
In another outreach activity some club members have been helping out at the AONB (now Cranborne Chase National Landscape) observation evenings organised at locations around Cranborne Chase by local Dark Sky Advisor Steven Tonkin. It’s good that we can play our part in these events by offering telescopes and observing expertise as part of our contribution to astronomy in the wider community.
This contact with other clubs and events has led to consideration among the committee and a consultation with you the members about setting up our own Zoom facilities so that we can offer these clubs “attendance” at our events. The committee has done a lot of work on this looking into costings, and running tests from the Grosvenor and from their homes; it proved, however, that the broadband facilities at the Grosvenor are too unreliable, but this thorough examination and consultation process was an excellent piece of research and leadership facing up to the fact that – desirable as it would have been – we are not able to meet the Zoom challenge for the moment. So, Zoom access will be an important factor to take into account when we look for a new venue and the excellent groundwork on this will contribute to that.
As regards “community” events i.e. not for astronomers only, the Club participated in three of these during the course of the year:
On the communications side, in September your committee decided that WhatsApp was perhaps not the best app for the needs of the Club. It is too “singular” in the sense that images, comments, discussion, telescope sales, our blue flag messages, and all sorts of other material is collected on a single “thread,” so it sometimes requires a lot of scrolling through to find what you are looking for or to answer a previous post. So, we have introduced “Discord” as an improved means of communication for the Club’s requirements. On Discord you can set up different and discrete channels for topics of discussion, message other members of the Club without having to include the whole membership in your chats, set up small or larger groups for different topics or internal communication. We had a couple of short introductory sessions to it after our talks.
A busy year, and we hope to keep up the diverse number of events and club participation in 2025.