Talk:Royal Astronomical Society

Content expansion
Well done, Rob! I've made a few changes to round out the entry a little further and to reflect the work of the RAS in the geophysical sciences. I've removed a slight inaccuracy in the previous version -- the Society's rules for award of medals are rather more complicated than "one medal for astronomy; one medal for geophysics", as implied there, but it certainly isn't worth going into the arcane details in a Wikipedia entry! It might be worth mentioning one or two of the geophysical eminences who have received the Gold Medal (Harold Jeffreys, for sure; Sidney Chapman must surely have received one, too). I'll come back to that later.

I've also inserted entries for one or two of the stubs that this edit has developed.

Russ Evans 26/12/03

Patrick Moore as President?
I rather doubt this. It's not mentioned in his Who's Who (UK) entry. --Runcorn 19:44, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Establishment category?
The RAS is currently in the category '1831 establishments'. Should it be in '1820 establishments' instead? --Robminchin 00:03, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Astronomical Society of London is 1820. The Royal charter was in 1831. People looking in the 1820 category might expect to find the RAS. People looking in the 1831 category might also expect to find it. I think categorising the redirect will do. Carcharoth 17:12, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Redirection from "Astronomical Society"
At the moment, "Astronomical Society" redirects here. This could cause some confusion, and the hatnote is an attempt to alert readers to it. I just reverted a change by Modest Genius, who had changed the hatnote to refer only to the societies whose names resemble "Royal Astronomical Society". I would be in favour of putting that change back in if the redirection from "Astronomical Society" was removed, or changed to a disambiguation page, or even redirected to the List of Astronomical Societies. Or is there some particular reason why it should redirect to this article in particular? --Gronk Oz (talk) 16:33, 24 July 2014 (UTC)
 * I hadn't realised that Astronomical Society redirected here. That seems rather odd - surely it should go directly to List of Astronomical Societies? 150 years ago the phrase 'the astronomical society' probably really did refer to the RAS, but today there are dozens of astronomical societies. Maybe bring it up at WP:AST or WP:RFD. For the moment I've tweaked the hatnote to avoid singling out any one particular society - we can reassess if/when the redirect changes. Modest Genius talk 09:24, 25 July 2014 (UTC)
 * As almost all of the links to Astronomical Society have been changed, I fixed the last few and redirected it to the list. Modest Genius talk 17:18, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Assessment comment - 2007
Substituted at 05:00, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Could mention The Astronomical Register
It covered the London meetings of the RAS ~1878 and also correspondence from Fellows of RAS. eg The Astronomical Register ~1878 often mentions "Royal Astronomical Society" and has a record of meetings and correspondence & subscribing members. Mentioned for the redirect. Seems to be an independent publication by Jackson about RAS meetings rather than by the RAS. - Rod57 (talk) 21:46, 11 November 2018 (UTC)


 * The 'publications' section deliberately only covers the RAS's own publications, not reports about the RAS appearing elsewhere. Lots of places have reported on RAS meetings, including some very obscure periodicals in the nineteenth century. The 'meetings' section mentions The Observatory, which carries the current formal minutes of Ordinary Meetings, but I don't think we need to list everywhere that ever reported on one. Modest Genius talk 16:57, 12 November 2018 (UTC)