The British Association of Planetaria is an organisation close to my heart. I served as Treasurer (2011) and President (2011-2014), have hosted the conference twice, and currently hold the wonderfully-entitled role of “Lore Keeper” (2022-).
This year we met in Armagh, Northern Ireland, the longest-running planetarium in the UK. Armagh Planetarium and Observatory is a lovely place, bringing historical and modern astronomy together with science communication. It was a perfect venue for the conference and our hosts had organised everything beautifully - I can’t remember a more relaxed event.
We were honored this year to be joined by Terence Murtagh, who was Director of Armagh 1971-1989. Under his innovative stewardship, Armagh was the first plantarium in the world to use video, and the first to use automated audience-response systems. Terence was also the driving force behind BAP being set up, calling a meeting of UK planetariums in 1978 which was followed by the first independent BAP conference being held in 1985. He went on to serve as President of the International Planetarium Society (IPS), lead development of Digistar 3 (the first fulldome video software), and continued as a significant worldwide influence on the development of planetaria until his recent retirement.
During the conference, I gave an overview of resources available through the International Astronomical Union, and from the IPS Education Committee (you can find these resources linked from my Networks page). I talked about the IPS White Paper The Value of the Planetarium in Education in some detail, and also gave a brief overview of an indepedent benchmarking study of the RSA Cosmos SkyExplorer Live Atlas, which I recently conducted with Dr Darren Baskill.
Finally there was an unexpected highlight during the BAP AGM, where - to my very great surprise - I received a BAP Special Contribution Award for my work with AstroBoost. And so I am delighted to have been presented with one of the highly coveted “BAP Bubbles”. Thanks so much everyone, I really appreciate it.