[Greg Priestley]

Let me get one thing off my chest first. If someone had a problem with Rule 4 - then why the hell didn't you contact me in the first instance for clarification? I had two people contact me after the posting of the rules, of which one was about Rule 4 and what it actually meant. But no one who entered into the thread bothered to go to the source.

Surely that's a better way of getting to what the rule is about then the raft of speculation, factually incorrect and slanderous comments that have since been made in the forums which only leads to confusion all round. Congratulations.

I fully expect and respect that some people will not agree with the terms and conditions of the competition. There is nothing I can do about this as YOU CAN'T PLEASE EVERYONE ALL THE TIME. If nothing was changed then people would have been upset, if it was changed differently then a different group would be upset.

There is no set of rules which everyone would be universally happy with. Instead I stive for a balance that is fair and inclusive as possible.

Having said that, let's look at a bit of background and my rationale for the change.

Apparently there was an astro imaging competition being run in conjunction with the SPSP for some years, but I only became active in astronomy in 2004 and the first two competitions that I'm familiar with are those organised by Richard Jaworski in 2005 and 2006. Richard hung up the organising hat at that point (a decision I can now fully appreciate), and on the brink of the competition last year being cancelled because no one wanted to take on the organising role, I threw my hat into the ring but with some definitive ideas in
mind for change to, in my opinion, improve the competition.

I'm not really sure why the competition first started, but in my mind there was a number of good reasons to keep it going - the astro imaging section is (was? - I'm sure the occulation group would argue that one these days) the most active section of the ASNSW and I thought it would be pretty damning if we couldn't even manage to continue an established competition which was after all for the benefit of the section. It's also a bit of fun, it allows everyone to benchmark their work against others, it's good promotion for astro imaging and encourages people to get involved and it provides an
additional activity for those attending the SPSP. It also gives a pat on the back to entrants.

The competition in 2005 was equipment based with categories from memory of Film, Digital SLR's, webcams and CCD's. Based on feedback from that compeition, the subsequent year this was changed to an object based competition, with the five current categories established. I believe there were a number of reasons for the change - the disparity in the number of images entered into different categories, the difficulty of comparing images of different objects within categories, the demise of film and the like.
In 2006 Richard introduced some changes to the competition with respect to voting - an extremely complicated but ever more transparent cross judging process from a number of independent judges. But regardless of the fairness of the system, he'd still get complaints that judging was flawed.

When I took on organising last year's competition, trying to reduce the workload and logistical hassles was one of my focuses (yes I have a life and didn't want to spend weeks organising this thing).

A major area is that of voting - if you go down the independent voting path, you have to have quite a number of judges, ideally experienced astro imagers. Trying to get this number who are both attending the star party, and also not entering the competition - is a real challenge. So I introduced two changes - the first was that entrants themselves were involved in the voting process (with a number of other independent judges to help avoid deadlocks in voting) - so at the end of the day, if entrants didn't like the results then it was only themselves to blame!

I also introduced the "People's Choice" award where all the attendees of the SPSP got a vote. This was really an experiment - would their voting be consistent with the astro imagers themselves? The answer was yes - it turns out that when you have 300+ people vote, you get reliable results - and also avoid criticisms of fairness (300+ judges surely can't be all wrong). [This year the primary voting will be by attendees of the SPSP, with the entrants judging able to be used to break deadlocks in voting].

The other change was the abolition of prizes and the intoduction of "the Astros" trophies (hey I'm selfish - it's a major effort required to shake the trees of enough sponsors to see what prizes fall out, plus I think it goes against the spirit of the competition of being recognised by your peers).

From most feedback that was received by the ASNSW SPSP committee and on forwarded to me, as well as those who contacted /discussed with me directly, the changes were well accepted and thought to be a positive step forward.

The big controversy was relating to the winning images of Mike Sidonio. Let me take this opportunity of set the facts correct here because a lot of people who attended the SPSP have a misunderstanding that all of his images were from mixed data.

Mike entered six images - three in Nebula and three in Galaxies. Two of the Nebula images included RGB data taken by Wolfgang Promper (Mike captured the Ha data in the images which was the majority of the image capture time) and was used with Wolfgang's permission and was fully disclosed on his entry form. Mike also got up and acknowledged this during his acceptance speech when his "Eye of God" image was awarded the best image by the astro imagers. Mike also was runner up in this category with his "Pillars of Creation" - an image entirely from his own data. Mike also took out the "People's Choice" award, but this time with a shot of the M83 galaxy, again an image entirely from his own data.

The conditions of entry were sufficiently vague as not to prohibit the use of external data, and given that Mike had disclosed it in his entry form then I didn't have a major problem with it (I'll admit I didn't actual notice this on the entry form until after the images had been posted and voting had opened - which makes it even harder to then reconsider the issue).

Even had these images not been accepted, Mike still would have won the Nebula category with "Pillars of Creation" which was entirely his own work, as well as the Galaxies and the People's Choice (also his own work), although from memory the places for second might have changed (I don't particular want to go back and reanalyse the results).

But based on all of the feedback from last year, I felt that this situation should not be allowed to re-occur and therefore drafted a new condition.

<see part 2>