Quote:
Originally Posted by Amunous
As for the elitist jerk saying that the pony club is an inferior observing site.. that's fine stay home I would rather not listen to you whine all night about how crap the sky is.
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Hi Michael,
You have a lot to learn about Astronomy and human nature. I am far from an elitist. I have done more over the past 25+ years to help beginners, newcomers, social groups and schoolchildren, than you can possibly imagine and will continue to do so.
I got my nose out of joint because a bit over 4 years ago several of the then newcomers essentially took over the group and migrated it to a clearly inferior
observing site than what we had used for well over 2 years.
The reason they preferred the Pony Club was it had a warm cosy shed, an urn for hot coffee, a pie oven to keep the party pies hot and a fridge to keep the pyss cold. These are clearly major pre requisites for a good dark sky observing site to a serious observer. One of the then newcomers made the comment at the time, "the Pony Club is great, it has nice low horizons, particularly to the South". Yeah great, much closer to the lights of Gosford than the Paintball Place and nice low horizons to let all the light pollution in from Gosford and the surrounding houses. Further, what serious observer wants to observe down there in the soup anyway, unless it's a target that never reaches higher elevation. Clearly the focus of these people was on the creature comforts of home, hot party pies, hot coffee and cold pyss, and not on the quality of observing conditions. If you think the Pony Club has good skies you seriously know very little about observing and sky quality. I would rate it 3/10 at best, Paintball was 6/10, Bucketty is 7/10, Ilford and Lostock are 8/10, Coonabarabran is 9/10.
We had a far darker site exactly the same distance from the Freeway at the Paintball Place and unfortunately burned our bridges there and couldn't return. This meant that the people who were serious about observing had to find an alternative site, that had decent sky quality
You speak of elitist? It doesn't get any more elitist, or a takeover, than the group of newcomers, who now term themselves regulars, having never once offered a key in 4+ years, before yesterday, to any of the
ORIGINAL Central Coast observing group, which included Rod Berry, Mike Salway, Andrew Catsaitis, Andrew Murrell, Gary Kopff and myself.
This is the last post I will make on the subject. I have aired my gripe.
Cheers,
John B
