Hi John,
I've been meaning to report back on this.
Sorry! :oops:
We had a committee meeting last week and one of the issues we discussed was the calender. I had received a number of images from people here, all of which were simply superb. However, there were a number of issues with the calender which will mean that it won't go to print this year.
1) Timing. We left it WAY too late in the year to think about the calender. As I was preparing the calender, other calenders were already on the shop shelves! To do it right means firstly making a few different samples, getting a couple of trial prints from the printers, making the neccessary changes and then getting the final print. Basically, I didn't know what I was letting myself in for until I got stuck into it. Then it struck it me that we should really have started into this back about six months ago and have it fully printed off by the end of October to have it in the local shop shelves for shotly after Halloween. As this is the first year, it'll take a bit work initially to get aomething we can all agree on.
2) Images. A I stated earlier, I received a number of excellent images from people here. However, I would ideally like to have a number of images from club members who could specifically use the calender as a focal point for learning astrophotography. TAS have recently started holding pre-planned organised observing sessions and are currently setting up a mobile phone/e-mail alerting service for impromptu observing sessions. It would be my aspiration to encourage astrophotography at these sessions with the aim of having a good selection of images in the calender whilst also having some from people outside TAS.
3) Software. If I'm (or whoever else) is gonna do this, we want to do this properly. To that end we need to have the right tools and know how to use them. I hope to start on some calender templets shortly after Christmas when I get the software.
In summary, I hope to start working on some basic designs shortly after Christmas, get them run by the committee, encourage more club members to try and get into astrophotography in the next six months and then seek images from non-TAS members to get a calender to the printers in the Autumn next uear.
Again, apologies for not reporting back on this. I should have kept everyone up to date. :oops:
Regards,
  