MNASSA : Monthly Notes of the Astronomical Society of South Africa

Journal articles detail the general logic behind new results and ideas, but often the source codes that enable these results remain hidden from public view and those who author these computational methods have not always received credit for their work. This presentation will cover recent changes in astronomy, and indeed, in many other disciplines, that include new journals, policy changes for existing journals, community resources such as the Astrophysics Source Code Library, changes to infrastructure, and availability of new workflows that make recognizing the contributions of software authors easier. This talk will include steps coders can take to increase the probability of having their software cited correctly and steps researchers can take to improve their articles by including citations for the computational methods that enabled their research.

Amateur telescope makers hesitate to build Cassegrain telescopes due to the difficulty of testing the convex hyperboloidal secondary mirrors. The Foucault test is, however, applicable to inspecting secondly mirrors from the rear side of the convex surface. This way of testing the convex surface makes the production of a Cassegrain secondary much easier than other methods. For this to be feasible, the mirror blank should be of optical glass. The method of retouching a convex surface is different from that of parabolizing a concave surface.

This article continues the sequential numbering of reported fireball sightings from southern Africa. By definition, a fireball is any meteor event with brightness equal to or greater than visual magnitude (mv) −4. The following events were reported to the author and details are reproduced as given by the observer [any comments by the author are given in brackets]. All times were converted to UT unless stated, and all coordinates are for epoch J2000.0.