Galway Starparty 2012 U-turn

For those that may have not heard this already the Galway Star Party/Astronomy festival is about to join the ranks of the Whirlpool SP, even though this year was very successful and we had a date for next January the committee have decided not to go ahead with the event again. With the amount of time, energy, club resources and money organising this event yearly we have decided to cancel this event and going forward to focus on club events that are now more important.

A few Friday's back we had 15,000 visitors to the Sea 2 Sky event in Leisureland, Salthill. Many thousands passed our stand as was positioned next to the main door and also beside the Blackrock Castle Stardome, A huge moral boost for the club and in future we want to plan some public events for Global Astronomy Month, Space week, etc, there are other projects we are involved one in particular like the guys at SAC with getting a club observatory going, all these projects require money and people while doing a starparty takes all that away for several months of the year and severely diminishes the club resources.

Going forward we have a busy schedule of talks, observing events, our membership increased 40% over the past year and hope to concentrate on getting more people interested in astronomy while starting another yearly local event but with a different and more public outreach format

I just want to thank all those who at one time or another attended our Starparty, especially to those who attended every one of them and to all the people frm IFAS who spoke at it, Thank you!


Ronan Newman
GAC secretary

Ronan, firstly let me congratulate you and all the people in GAC
that put so much time and effort into running the starparty.
I've been an atendee for many years and a grateful guest speaker
on one occasion. It truely was a great event.
I personally fully understand your reasons for not running it.
It is a huge effort and actually often gains little to nothing for the
club running an event if this scale.
it in fact drains peoples energys and the club then suffers.
Often like SAC, financially also.
I have no doubt the club will only go from strength to strength
now as we have found at SAC.
(Now we can afford to buy equipment and even consider
trips / observatory) something just not possible running
a massive confrence each year.
Let me wish you and all at GAC all thre very best
in the future.

Whole heartedly agree Frank. It's a pity Ronan as it was one of the stand out highlights of the Irish Astronomy calendar. Congrats on all previous shows and hope to see it again in the future

DaveG

Ronan, I can completely understand your thinking on all this.
Like Frank says, starparties (conferances) such as these are a massive burden on those involved. We can relate with the WSP, the club here never so much as got a single new member out of it and never made money, infact it often had to be subsidised from the club coffers.
Some people will say "for shame", it happened to us, my answer is they can go run it if they like.
We run free public events by the river in Limerick, in our biggest event we got well over 100 people at it, and new members aswell. IMHO this is a far more usefull and hassle free scenario to be involved with.
The club here now can finally buy telescopes and eyepieces, something we could have only dreamed of a few years back.

Hi Ronan,
Being a new astronomer I never did get to your event. I do however completely understand your decision.
But you know I think the problem is one of expectation. I see a lot of parallels with my years in organising orienteering (in Galway actually) where we would put many hours into the "big events" but with little or no return in the kine of membership. It was the little local events which returned this. For the orienteering though these still required almost the same amount of work so it was a bit more difficult.

Looking back, and from the comments in this thread, I now see that these big events are for the converted and we should never expect to get new membership from it. Because it is for the converted we have to put a lot more effort into it whereas a local starparty just requires observing with a little advice for the new folk. I'd imagine this advice is what gets the new members in. A supported curiousity will easily convert to a member.

As a suggestion, maybe one annual "IFAS starparty" could be rotated through the clubs/club-combination/regions in a similar way to the Orienteering championships which is rotated on a provincial basis. This could possibly keep the big get-together alive without killing the organisers aho at the moment are doing this annually. Is this worth discussing?

John

That's a shame but I remember SAC making this decision in 2009 and I don't think they have looked back since. An Ifas event is a good idea to share resources but some club would have to volunteer and take the lead.