Fellowship
Members of the RAS are styled fellows, and may use the postnominals FRAS. Fellowship is open to anyone over the age of 18 who is considered acceptable to the society. As a result of the society's foundation in a time before there were many professional astronomers, no formal qualifications are required. However, around three quarters of fellows are professional astronomers or geophysicists. The society acts as the professional body for astronomers and geophysicists in the UK and fellows may apply for the Science Council's Chartered Scientist status through the society. The fellowship passed 3,000 in 2003.
Read more about this topic: Royal Astronomical Society
Famous quotes containing the word fellowship:
“Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day,—not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,—and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Have no fellowship with one that is mightier and richer than thyself: for how agree the kettle and the earthen pot together? For if the one be smitten against the other, it shall be broken.”
—Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus 13:2.
“And sometimes I remember days of old
When fellowship seemed not so far to seek,
And all the world and I seemed much less cold,
And at the rainbow’s foot lay surely gold,
And hope felt strong, and life itself not weak.”
—Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)