Sky and Telescope - October 2015 - 84

Focal Point

Gary Seronik

The Great Watering Hole
What have we lost with the dilution of sci.astro.amateur?
I stopped in at sci.astro.amateur
(s.a.a.) the other day for old times' sake.
What was once a very busy newsgroup
is now a quiet Google group. It was like
returning to a familiar neighborhood
after a long absence and ﬁnding almost
everyone you once knew had moved away
and many stores had been boarded up.
For those of us who jumped onto the
internet in the mid-90s, the original s.a.a.
was an essential cyberspace stop.
Back then, it was terribly addictive:
once drawn into a thread, you were
hooked for good or ill. And no matter the
issue, you could count on a passionate
debate. Best way to collimate an SCT?
Hot topic! How big a central obstruction
is too big? Flame war! No subject was too
benign to generate outrage and spark a
lively exchange. A lot of it was vacuous
and needlessly vitriolic, but wasn't it fun?

True, s.a.a. was also a favorite hangout for a herd of notorious trolls. But as
numerous as they were, the trolls did
manage to post on-topic once in a while.
More importantly, they were outnumbered
by spectacularly generous and experienced
individuals who seemed to have no end
of patience for helping a steady stream of
newbies who inadvertently stumbled into
the fray. Most of all, what made s.a.a. great
was that virtually everyone seemed to stop
in once in a while to chat. It was the Great
Watering Hole of amateur astronomy.
Today, there are plenty of places to
discuss your favorite astro topics online.
In fact, there might be too many. Cloudy
Nights, Facebook, Google+, IceInSpace,
Twitter, Yahoo Groups, and many other
networks host specialized groups and
forums. If your interest is Newtonian
reﬂectors, there's a forum for that. SCTs?

Forum for that. Sketching? Forum. Lunar
observing? Check. And so on. Only a
dedicated curmudgeon could see so
much variety as a bad thing.
But at the risk of ﬁtting that unﬂattering proﬁ le, I have to say that I miss
having a single online clubhouse where
everyone hangs out. What we've lost is
the ease with which diﬀerent perspectives
come together and ideas cross-pollinate. It
seems each of us has found our tribe, and
now we're content to exist on tiny islands
of thought. Sure, you could read more
than one forum - I regularly check in on
a half dozen myself - but who has the
time to look at enough to really sample
a broad cross section of our wonderfully
diverse hobby?
Is there a Great Watering Hole
anywhere today? As self-serving as this
might sound, I'm going to say you're
looking at it right now. Yes, this and other
magazines provide a common point of
contact for amateur astronomers. In these
pages you see the entire spectrum of the
hobby represented month after month.
And while no print publication can hope
to match the interactivity and immediacy
of online forums, magazines do allow us
to dip into a common well of ideas and
draw from it what we will.
This magazine is a shared experience
- something that has grown increasingly
scarce in our media-saturated, multi-platform electronic age. The inevitable march
of progress might have overtaken s.a.a.,
but I for one am glad that we at least still
have this watering hole. ✦

ABBEY LOSSING

Gary Seronik, an S&T contributing editor,
kept himself busy for this issue. See his Binocular Highlight on page 43, his test report
on page 60, and his Telescope Workshop
column on page 72.
84

October 2015 sky & telescope
Sky and Telescope - October 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky and Telescope - October 2015
