The Astral Award
First presented by John Perdrix’s Astral Press in 1986, the Astral Award recognises the best presentation at the NACAA Convention.
| Year | Recipient | Title of presentation |
| 2026 | Neville Fraser | But I’m Not Dead Yet! – the Surprisingly Short History of the Barn Door Tracker |
| 2024 | Joint Winner: John Drummond | Halley’s Comet in 1910 – from a New Zealand perspective |
| 2024 | Joint Winner: Roy Axelson | Southern eclipsing binary light curves from TESS |
| 2022 | Terry Cuttle | Five Total Solar Eclipses coming to Australia |
| 2020 | Alas, COVID-19 cancelled the event | |
| 2018 | Chris Morley | A Visit to the Very Large Telescope |
| 2016 | Donna Burton | Dating Active Young Stars |
| 2014 | Saeed Salimpour | Captain Henry Evans Baker: A Star, Nerd or Futurist? |
| 20122 | Anthony Dutton, Gregorie Bond, and Julian West Ray Johnston and Rick Stevenson |
Near Infrared Phase Lag of Mira Variable R Carinae |
| 2010 | David O’Driscoll | Robotic Research for the Amateur Astronomer |
| 2008 | Surjit Wadhwa | Light Curve Analysis of Contact Binary Stars |
| 2006 | Jeff Byron | Itokawa, YORP and the Cecil Sayers Observatory |
| 2004 | Tom Richards | Amateurs getting violent: black holes, synchotrons and magnetic flares |
| 2002 | Colin Bembrick | Minor planet light curve determination |
| 2000 | Stephen Russell | Chasing shadows: photographing solar eclipses |
| 1998 | Vello Tabur | Computer-aided comet hunting |
| 1996 | Zac Pujic | The Cookbook CB245 CCD camera: evaluation of performance |
| 1994 | Fraser Farrell | The recruitment and supervision of amateur variable star observers |
| 1992 | Peter Nelson and Jim Park | Observing mutual phenomena of Jupiter’s moons 1991 |
| 1990 | Peter Nelson, JL Blanksby, and AW Kruijshoop | Recent planetary and lunar occultations by the Occultation Section of the ASV |
| 19881 | Peter Jones | Computer star maps |
| 1986 | Tom Cragg | CV Aquarii |
1The 1988 NACAA committee also presented an award to Barry Adcock for his presentation Measurement of Mars’ Pole Cap and Associated Atmospheric Haze. The reason for the separate awards was due to the antagonism of the 1988 Convenor towards Perdrix’s establishment of the Australian Journal of Astronomy. Aaah, politics.
2A communication error resulted in the award being presented at the BBQ to Tony Barry, Dave Gault, and Hristo Pavlov for their presentation on developing a new high-performance camera system for occultation observations.