This month a new Council will take over the affairs of the Victoria Centre and move us into the second quarter of this century. Many of the people in the new Council will be the same as in recent years, but I will be moving on after having served my third year as president, albeit 20 years after my first two years in that post.
The new council will be chosen at our Annual General Meeting that will take place on Zoom on February 10. Two weeks later we will hold our annual Banquet at the Four Mile Pub. The new location and format for the banquet were established with a successful event last year, and I hope this banquet will brighten one of the colder times of the year.
Our Council met in January and I can report that preparations for events for later in the year, including Astronomy Day, our Summer Star Party and others, is well under way thanks to our volunteers on and off council. We’ve already held our first monthly members meeting and first Astronomy Cafes of 2025.
The incoming council will face challenges such as continuing the work of organizing our online storage of centre documents, dealing with the news that we must move our centre library, and creating a policy covering telescopes belonging to the Centre.
Much of this work got under way in the past year. Of course when we look back on 2024, we will remember the astronomical events. Many of us traveled east or south to see the April 8 total solar eclipse, and most of us were rewarded with clear skies and a memorable eclipse, contrary to the longer-term weather predictions.
Barely a month later, our active Sun rewarded us with a rare and memorable display of the Aurora Borealis, and it was not the only Auroral display of the year in Island skies. In the fall, many of us also enjoyed seeing and imaging Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. As always, our members continue to produce dazzling images of distant objects in the sky.
In terms of our centre activities, 2024 was undoubtedly the most normal year we have enjoyed since the disruptions of the pandemic. We had a full year of monthly meetings and Astro Cafes, a successful Astronomy Day at the Royal BC Museum and the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, and an excellent Summer Star Party on the Saanich Peninsula on the grounds of St. Stephen’s Anglican Church, along with outreach activities at the Saanich Fair and elsewhere.
The Friends of the DAO had a good year of star parties and other events, many of them with our help, and they are now working on freshening up the exhibits at the Centre of the Universe.
Although technical improvements at the Victoria Centre Observatory were punctuated with a computer failure last fall, our technical committee has restored full functions there. In 2024 our centre website underwent its most extensive upgrade in years. We also have ongoing activities like our Special Interest Groups.
As for me, I hope to continue my involvement in putting on many of our centre activities alongside other volunteers. I have also been working on an exciting television production that touches on the early history of astronomy in Victoria as seen through the eyes of John S. Plaskett, the founder of the DAO and along the way, our centre. It should be completed later this spring.
In the meantime, I offer my thanks to everyone who made this past year a great one for the Victoria Centre, and I look forward to seeing more of you going forward as together we continue to explore the universe!