Not After One, Except for a Nova

Waking, Confirmation and Credit in the Night Telephone Chain of a Provincial Astronomical Society, 1958–1991

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities reconstructs the night telephone chain a provincial amateur astronomical society kept from 1958 to 1991, through 1,603 calls on 214 alerts entered in its Night Book, the surviving annual revisions of its calling list and fourteen interviews. It argues that the chain, founded to confirm suspected discoveries, recorded who could be woken rather than who could see: twenty-three of its thirty-nine confirmed sightings were credited to members on shift work, and the Bulletin's "seen also" line came to rank members by their nights.

@misc{slop_abkefj,
  author       = {Halvard Nnamani},
  title        = {Not After One, Except for a Nova: Waking, Confirmation and Credit in the Night Telephone Chain of a Provincial Astronomical Society, 1958–1991},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.abkefj},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-social-history-abkefj/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}