Apologies for absence were received from Macclesfield AS, Southport AS and Altrincham AS.
Minutes were accepted. Gerard Gilligan (Liverpool AS) said that Peter Wilson had tended his resignation as NWGAS representative for the BAAs Campaign for Dark Skies. Peter's letter of 8th October, referring to the CfDS section of the Minutes was read, together with KJK's reply of 16th Oct. Peter's resignation was regretted and KJK was asked to send a letter in acknowledgement of his contribution to the Group.
May Bank Holiday at Jodrell: This matter was raised briefly but in Cherry Moss's absence it was decided to postpone further discussion. It is therefore accepted that the NWGAS will not be attending the Jodrell Bank Holiday weekend this year unless societies want to make specific individual arrangements.
Gerard Gilligan reminded the meeting that the role of the NWGAS representative was to coordinate information fed from the area reps and to pass this on to Bob Mizon at the BAA. The area reps responsibility was to liase with local lighting engineers and councils and to put forward the case for sympathetic lighting, especially re new building projects. Each society was encouraged to have a rep to feed info to Bob and to promote the CfDS within that society.
In the discussion that followed there was a feeling that CfDS was successfully swaying local councils towards the more economic full cut-off lighting on new projects. However, the trend to floodlight city centre public buildings was continuing, unabated especially in the run up to the millennium celebrations.
It was thought that the public were generally so oblivious to the beauty of the night sky that they were unaware of the impact that increased lighting was having. Kath Redford expressed her opinion that even in astronomical societies, there was apathy re the continued increase in outdoor lighting.
Correction to the last Minutes. The FAS newsletter is edited by Rob Barter, not Pam Spence.
Society October November December
NWGAS 354 295 220
Altrincham & Dist AS* 62 68 56
Blackpool & Dist AS 47 49 33
Bolton* 65 56 41
Chester AS 79 67 48
Furness AS 49 47 35
Gwynedd AS 24 32 20
Liverpool AS* 59 46 39
Macclesfield AS* 123 103 60
Manchester AS* 36 35 27
Preston & Dist AS* 30 35 20
Salford AS* 29 32 24
Southport AS 34 34 27
StarWatch UK 707 843 471
CfDS 1380 1397 1103
SPA 2262 2274 1544
Manchester AS 2127 2174 1745
Note the high number of hits that Macclesfield AS has been getting. The figures for all the web sites are generally higher than normal.
StarWatch UK: I received an email from the FAS to ask me to put a link from the WUK web page to a notice on the FAS site. This has been done. The notice is on page http://www.fedastro.demon.co.uk/starwatch.html and is reproduced below.
WWW Updates Please send updated notices of meetings and any corrections to the printouts (handed out at the Salford meeting) so that I can keep the web pages up to date.
This is an ideal opportunity to liaise between societies with the potential of mutual collaboration. Please do this directly, there is no time via the NWGAS meetings. And don't forget the best eclipse photograph competition. Contributions to Mike Oates please for the web pages.