Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2020

44 MARCH-APRIL 2020 OUR EXPERIENCES net. Perhaps, this was because content on the web had evolved and in- creased to such an ex- tent that, instead of helping, this content sometimes overwhelmed the neophyte. We meet many people who want to buy a new telescope, to learn how to use what they already have, or to make progress in their hobby after their first contact. In that respect, someone like an associa- tion member, who has selected some informa- tion available on the web and summarized it a little according to indi- vidual needs, can be of great help. Additionally, the ama- teur astronomer who wants to leave the city in search of dark skies encounters many difficul- ties in finding optimal places to ob- amateur astronomy associations would end. In our specific case, we noticed in the Astronomical Society of Granada a remarkable decrease in the influx of new membership in the first decade of the 2000s, proba- bly in part attributable to the factors mentioned above. A different change then be- gan to happen for some ob- servers, and soon it became clear that sharing and team- work (albeit with a colleague who was on the other side of the world) yielded a richer ex- perience than just reading content on the Internet. We rediscovered the human side of astronomical observa- tion, which had always been there, with the difference be- ing that we expanded its reach on a planetary scale. In the second decade of the 2000s, we started to gather interested people again. Curiously, the same cause for the re- duced number of visitors previously became the new catalyst: the Inter-