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Chance To Snap Up Your Own Observatory
Hugh Pickens writes "Like to own your own five-story observatory equipped with a 12" Meade Schmidt Cassegrain catadioptric telescope and a 20-inch Shafer-Maksutov telescope — the second-largest of its kind in the world? Well, there's one for sale at Marina Towers in Swansea, at an observatory that could be Wales' largest telescope. The Swansea Astronomical Society moved out two years ago, blaming increased rent and other costs. So the city council has asked interested parties to submit their proposals and financial offers by the end of March. Brian Spinks, the chair of the society, says the extra rent and running costs meant the society's members would have had to find around £40,000 over the next 10 years. 'The members can no longer be expected to finance such a public presence from their annual subscription. If we had to find £40,000 over the next 10 years it would kill the society.' The observatory was built in 1988 and includes a domed roof, an access tower that houses a spiral staircase, a stained-glass roof by artist David Pearl and panels of carved poetry by Nigel Jenkins. 'We'd like to see a mixed-use development that incorporates features of the existing observatory building,' says Coun Gareth Sullivan, Swansea council's cabinet member for regeneration. 'Bringing the observatory back into use would add even more vitality to the promenade.'"
That's a car, financed over 10 years instead of 5. Must be a pretty small society.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Replying to my own post... 80 members, so yeah, pretty small but only 500 funny currency symbols each over ten years each. That's just 50 per year. My guess is that their members don't want that kind of dues increase. I'd think they could have held birthday parties or some such and raised that money, though.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
4000£ "extra" a year may not sound like much, but for many small organizations it's a huge change in their budget. Sure, top earners may lose that kind of change in their sofa, but if your group is mostly average working people that money's going to be hard to come by. The economy of the past 3-4 years has not exactly been great for small organizations which rely on fundraisers and donations.
Heck, my town (of 40,000) in the US doesn't have a functioning dramatic theater that's available for community productions. In fact, there isn't one in the surrounding three towns either (total pop of 100,000+). To get a basic one up and running in one f our old warehouses, we figured it could be done - with lots of volunteer labor - for as little as $600,000. Of the 3-4 small dramatic companies in the towns mentioned, that's somewhere around 6x our combined annual operating budgets, and about 80x our annual surplus when we all have successful productions. Unless you've got a very wide appeal, or backing of a successful regional or national corporation that wants some exposure, niche endeavors are tough to keep funded.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
My impression from perusing Wikipedia is that this Shafer-Maksutov telescope is the second largest mainly because it's just not that good a design for professional work. I'm not an astronomer, though, by any means.
Any astronomers out there who could chime in on this?
It might be a big delta but it's not a lot of money. If you can't come up with 4000 pounds a year to support something with as much apparent value then apparently it's not actually worth maintaining.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, it would be hard to ask those not getting the benefit to pay, so maybe that's 100 members who pop in, maybe 3 nights a year, or 6 nights a years in pairs.
£4000 a year, for 100 members is £400 a member - with the commitment that you'll be able to find 100 such members for the next 10 years.
All in all, if the members don't / can't pay - or don't think it's worth the money, fair enough.
The site they're moving to -- the Gower -- has much darker skies than the glare of Swansea. So, yeah -- they've decided, probably for good reason, that it's not worth paying that much extra for light polluted skies, when they could maintain their costs and increase the quality of their experience.
Probably lousy seeing due to proximity to Swansea, and made worse by the "new lighting" on the "promenade between the observatory and Civic Centre".
I think they were just looking for an excuse to disband and/or find a new hobby
The society didn't disband. they just moved out - 2 years ago. Check their webiste.
I'd guess that they simply found a better location. I wouldn't be surprised if Swansea promenade suffered a lot of bad light pollution and their website gives the impression that they've got a better location, elsewhere. Maybe even, for less money.
Although it might sound nice for Swansea council to say "yes, we built an observatory on the promenade", it doesn't sound like it' was particularly successful if it's been 2 years since the previous users left and it's still empty. You have to wonder whether it was built with utility in mind (carvings? stained glass?) for astronomy, or simply as a vanity project for the council to spend public money on.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
That goes both ways. This sounds like a fantastic facility that is often made open to the public, that is completely maintained by the members, and which they pay to use. The community benefits enormously, and from the council's comments, they know it.
But because they've got some greedy assholes in charge now, they've decided to increase the rent by a factor of 20x over 10 years. And what determines the fair market value? I'm certain the improvements made over the years, paid for by the members, are a big part of it.
The best thing would for the council to realize the benefit they gain from having a fantastic learning resource run for them for free, and subsidizing the rent - maybe an increase is fair, but not that much - is a win/win for everyone.
At least one of the telescopes already seems to be in operation elsewhere:
"We are lucky to possess a fine observatory is situated at the Fairwood playing fields of the University College of Swansea; which is equipped with a 12" Meade Schmidt Cassegrain catadioptric telescope. Regular observing evenings are held at the Fairwood site...Please note that the Society no longer has any involvement with the Marina Towers Observatory on Swansea Bay"
http://www.swanastro.org.uk/
Looks like these astronomers would rather get on with looking at stars, rather than playing games with a local council that has decided to put the squeeze on them over rent at the Swansea Bay site (which they have already vacated). They'd probably be happy to continue to contribute to public education by running events at Marina Towers, but not if they have to bear the greatly increased costs the council has now decided to levy.
Fucking rich urban Americans and South-East Englanders. In Wales the median income, if you actually include everyone rather than massaging the figures only to include those who have been lucky enough to find full-time employment, is tiny. 4000 GBP/year is, in fact, not much more than what the state considers (via means-tested allowances) what you need to live on excluding rent costs.
Why doesn't he rent the place and turn it into a publicity center for his pseudo-space flight program? You know, future passengers can sip champagne and chat and rub shoulders with other folks with too much money? Take a peek through a real telescope, that is looking at outer space!
". . . oh, space, yes . . . that's where we're going . . . yes . . . so that's what we'll see up there . . . ? . . . jolly good, yes . . ."
Plus he could score some good PR points by letting the astronomers use it for free.
"Virgin Promiscuous is committed to satisfying the needs of science . . . ", etc.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
There are very few regulations for theatres. What regulations do exist are standard for pretty much any public building.
It costs so much because of all the electrics that need to be installed and the cost of all the instruments along with the dimmers and console. Those four things are the most costly (and required) when moving into a warehouse type space.
Flymen/rigger/electrician
We have a place in Tucson called Sky Bar that operates a couple big (12-16") telescopes on the smoking patio every evening. There are also large screen displays inside showing various astronomical wonders. But it's also the world capital of astronomy, so there are plenty of poeple who work in the industry (including myself) to keep the bar stools occupied.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Forget THFA, had you read even the /. intro you would have seen that this is an amateur astronomy club. They all have day jobs; this is their hobby, not an occupation.
Keep your community-college trolls to yourself.
I live in swansea and all i can say is this is typical of swansea council, They are greedy, corrupt and stupid.
Driving out useful tennants to leave facility like that empty can be added to the list of debacles which include asbestos in the public leisure centre, allowing hudreds of studio apartments to be built in the city centre that no one wants to live in and deciding the best transport policy was not to buy buses that could drive on the existing roads in the city centre but to buy extra long buses and re-lay miles of roads at great expense and inconvenience to everyone.
Just to correct some of the comments. The Tower and Observatory are empty - no scopes. The 20 inch is, in fact, the largest of its kind in the world and there is unlikely to be anything larger due to the difficulty of making and supporting this kind of mirror. The buildings were built with European funding. Change of use will bring many problems - disabled access, lift needed, fire regulations.....
Why not sell observing time over the internet? I'll bet there would be folks interested all over the world who would be willing to rent observing time over the internet. Just put a decent digital camera on the scope and interface the scopes to a network server. Allow folks to do some interesting work on both scopes when you're not using them for viewing. Check the online rates for telescope time, figure what, perhaps a 25%-50% rent out, and you should have more than enough to cover you costs and still put a little money aside for improving the observatory and have 100-150 nights a year of observing left over.
By the way, put a 105mm ELD refractor on the 20 inch as a finder scope (Orion has fair sized ELDs for a great price.) Put an image intensifier and a webcam on the 105mm to allow your internet users real time searching for deep space objects and your online users will be very happy. Oh and an automated filter loader to allow creating those beautiful synthetic colored images. Your initial outlay of cash would be what $10,000? Figure with a little advertisement in the popular science and astronomy magazines, you could recoup that in about 6-8 months and by your second year start making a profit.