RASC History Podcast: Recent Episodes
RASC
Stories of the RASC, based on the surviving artifacts, the members who made and used them, and what we’re learned—and haven’t learned—about doing citizen science.
Are we really better at making space for other traditions to express themselves? What ought we to do about representing and promoting astronomy and astronomies in a multi-cultural society heading towards our second centenary?
Special bonus episode: Heather and Randall talk about some of things that have been discussed so far in the podcast.
What is the RASC's tradition of encountering the Grand Astronomical spectacles of nature? Are there constants? What use is made of them? Are there limits to what advocates of astronomy can expect in the wake of major, and rare celestial events? Why?
The Society was founded in the tradition of learned societies which were repositories of material objects, from contemporary apparatus for loan in current experimental programs, to historic apparatus hallowed as relics of science past. How and why artifacts were kept can tell us what and how the past thought about its past. We explore these questions through several artifacts we've carefully retained, and others we've carelessly lost.
Is the gender history of the RASC a warning that "progress" in the social life of science is not always in the same direction, or at the same rate? And where are the invisible astronomers—LGBTQIA members, non-white members—in the RASC's past? Can they be identified, and their stories recovered?
Communities and the contacts which form and sustain them play a large role in astronomy. Of course, technologies and styles of communication change over time. The paper artifacts of the collaborative and social life of astronomy from the earlier periods of the RASC have a beguiling aura not of the present.
Over most of the time-span of the RASC, procuring the tools to do astronomy was radically different from what it is now. Telescopes were proportionally much more expensive, and wages lower than at present. Faced with those circumstances, many amateurs had little choice but to build their own equipment. And many did.
Assigning coordinates to stuff in the sky has been a lasting concern of astronomy for millennia. The ends served are numerous, including mythography, commerce, and astrophysics. We explore the inherited and RASC-created artifacts of such activity to sketch the range and style of uranography (celestial cartography) in the Society.
The nature of amateur astronomy—what it has been, what it is, and what it might aspire to be—has occasionally been contested within the community. From afar this may look like naval gazing by stargazers, but it can be seen to touch the heart and soul of amateur astronomy...
Amateur astronomers are often counselled to keep records of their observations. From a scientific standpoint, the observation in the log book is the primary record of a phenomenon visually observed, and for phenomena detected by other means...
Star parties—gatherings of people to recreationally view the night sky—are such an integral part of the social practice of amateur astronomy, that many think it was always so.
C.A. Chant (1865-1956) was a dominant figure in moulding the Society in the first half of the 20th century.