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
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

Fire in the Sky

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.