Happy Holidays folks and I hope everyone is enjoying the season despite the current health situation worldwide. With this posting I would like to inform you all that effective with the January edition of the
TSS Monthly Challenge I will be assuming responsibility for its administration. I appreciate being asked by Graeme if I would be interested in doing so, and am happy to be stepping up to the plate to help out.
The new year always carries a sense of freshness and renewal. With that in mind, I will be instituting some changes to the format of the challenge program. The basic reasoning for the challenge will remain the same. That being to encourage folks to get out under the skies to seek out something new, or at least revisit an old friend that perhaps they have not seen in some time. Our ultimate goal is as always to get people to bring out their scopes and get out there under the night sky. We are given an opportunity to turn our eyes and minds to the heavens in order to enjoy the riches of the universe. After all, that is why we are here on this site, to have fun, learn and share with those of like mind.
As to the changes I intend to make starting with January, we will no longer require members to suggest targets for the challenge and putting them into a random selection process. Rather I will establish the list of objects each month for you to hunt down by either visual (including sketching) or imaging means.
Another change will be in the number of objects. We have been limiting the challenge objects to one from each celestial hemisphere, with a visual magnitude limit no dimmer than 9.9. What I envision is to provide three objects per hemisphere each month. While at least one will fall within that established criteria, at least one of them will be more challenging. My intent here is to challenge visual folks to push their equipment and skills to improve as observers. Imagers already have an advantage in terms of reach into the deep because of the sensitivity of their equipment as compared to the human eye. But they must work on technique, and hopefully providing more and diverse objects will also aid them in that process.
Regardless if you are purely visual, like to sketch or image, you are encouraged to report back to this forum with your results and impressions each month. Even if you include these objects as part of a larger observing report in the Reports Forum, or a thread in the
AP forum, I still encourage you to post your results for the challenge objects here. This challenge is an observing project to supplement your regular activities, and our sharing of personal results can be a learning process for everyone. The sharing of our observing notes, sketches and/or images is the final product of the adventure - and a key element.
So with this rather verbose introduction, I hope to see more of you engaged with this challenge on a monthly basis. After all,
TSS provides this resource for your collective enjoyment, encouragement and learning. As I am fond of saying, the more fun we have the more we learn. And the more we learn the more fun we have. Thanks for reading along and stand by as I gather my resources and present the all new
TSS Monthly
DSO Challenge for January 2021 in the coming days. I hope you enjoy the changes and its spurs your interest to dig deeper into the universe. Most importantly, keep looking up!
