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thank you for your feedback on format of your participation. Those who have not, please ensure that you fill in the form indicating your type of participation. We hope that we will meet face to face in Sokobanja, because COVID-19 situation is improving in Serbia. However, we cannot be sure what will be recommendation of our government at the time of the conference. Therefore, 12th SBAC is going to be a blended meeting, providing a virtual participation for colleagues who will not be able to be present in person.

1) Hotel Moravica reservations at the 12thSBAC conference rate will be available until 10 September. After 10th September, you will be able to book a room in some other property or in the Hotel Moravica, but we cannot guarantee that this will be the case. Please reserve your room(s) in Hotel Moravica as soon as possible, indicating that you are participant in 12th Serbian Bulgarian Astronomical Conference.

2) We ask virtual participants to check out the text and video tutorials on how to register for the virtual access to the Conference, login to participate and give lecture via Webex Event because these tutorials will make you acquainted with the Webex platform:

Tutorial on registering for the virtual access to the Conference and login for the virtual participation to the Conference session:

For using Webex Events the best OS are: Windows and Mac OSX. Linux OS is not suitable for presenters.

Please note we will organize special test-sessions for all virtual participants, several days prior to the conference. You will receive an automatic invitation to join the test session.

3) Poster presentation:

• Make your poster using an application as usual
• Save your poster as a PDF in A4 format, not larger than 10MB
• Upload your poster using this form

Posters can be presented as 5min talks, so virtual presenters are kindly asked to follow tutorials in 1)

Best regards

The aim of this series of conferences is to contribute to the developing of collaboration and friendship of Serbian and Bulgarian astronomers, to stimulate the exchange of experiences, joint projects and common research. We organized eleven Serbian-Bulgarian and Bulgarian-Serbian astronomical conferences and this, XII SBAC will be held in Soko Banja.

When this series of conferences started the connections between Bulgarian and Serbian astronomers were rare, mutual visits sporadic and joint project do not existed. Now, after 22 years from the first one, as the result of these conferences we have five mutual SANU - BAN projects and new ones are in preparation; we have joint observations and we know much better each other. We hope that this conference will be also very useful for the further development of mutual collaboration, planning of common investigations and fruitful scientific research.

SESSION INSTRUCTIONS:

BASIC SESSION STRUCTURE:

• Each session will have a Host, a Moderator, a Session Chair, a presenter and participants. Host: This will be the LOC staff with a special icon by the side of the profile. This person facilitates the use of the technology and could be the same person as the Session Chair in some sessions. (NAME: Host ) Moderator: LOC staff who will help reading questions and checking rised hands Session Chair: This person is present to coordinate the session and manage Q&A.
• The chat among Participants will be allowed, based on request of some participants, thus please be aware of Code of conduct Technical staff will disable chat until the end of Conference if if the Code of conduct is violated

ORAL SESSIONS:

• 20 minutes before the Session: The Host will start the designated Webex meeting.
• 15 minutes before the Session: Chair and All Presenters for the sesssion are logged in. All presenters are checking their presentations.
• 2 minutes before the Session: The Host will start the recording.
• 1 minute before the Session: The Session Chair introduces himself and the session.
• Beginning of the Session: The Session Chair will introduce the presenter. Presenter turns on the camera (if possible) and share the presentation.
• Chair should turn off his microphone during the lecture to avoid possible background noise.
• We recommend that Chair turn on video to engage the attendees during the session introduction. After introducing the session and the first presenter, we recommend Chair turn off the video so that the attendees can focus on the talk. Chair can manage the attendee by clicking on the “View all attendees” link under the Participants panel. Chair and Presenters should take care of the allocated time slots due to differences in the internet band stabilities and possible band dips. The Conference Program is available at this link.
• A live Q&A Session will follow each talk moderated by the Session Chair Participants will be muted and they will need ask questions by rising hands or submitting through chat to the *All Panelist* ONLY.

PRESENTERS IN PERSON:

• In-person Presenters will be recorded and streamed into Webex platform in real time.
• In-Person Presenters should upload their presentations on the computer in the Conference Hall.

POSTER SESSION:

• Make your poster using an application as usual
• Save your poster as a PDF in A4 format, not larger than 10MB
• Upload your poster via this form, not later than Thursday 24.09, 15h CEST
• pdf will be attached to the Program list of posters, right click on the poster title to open it Posters can be presented as 5min talks, so poster presenters are kindly asked to follow instructions for Presenters. Chair will announce poster's Presenter and Host will open the pdf of poster, so the Poster presenter can give talk without sharing own screen. After hearing all posters you can ask questions.

FORMAT OF YOUR PARTICIPATION:

• Please indicate in-person or virtual format of your participation by filling the form , not later than Thursday 24.09, 12hCEST

WEBEX INVITATION FOR CONFERENCE:

• You will receieve an invitation for the Conference on Thursday 24.09. You will receive also time updates of the invitation for the each day of the Conference.

REGISTRATION FEE

12th SBAC has aimed to keep registration costs low and to make the conference content more easily accessible for the attendees. Since the 12th SBAC will be held as hybrid Conference, registration fee of 50 eur includes following items:

• preparation and publishing of Book of abstracts
• preparation and publishing of the Proceedings in the Special Issue

  Astronomy in the Big Data Era: Perspectives" of the journal “Data”

• preparation and publishing of the Proceedings proceedings of Publications of Astronomical Society "Rudjer Bošković".
• preparation and publishing of DVD with conference recordings
• using Webex platform for 100 attendees
• recordings of all talks
• CISCO digital equipment for transmission and live streaming of talks given in person
• technical staff who will moderate all sessions and help chairs and participants
• conference hall for in person talks
• printing badges for in person lecturers
• social events for in person participants
• conference certificates

Official contact email address:

Abstract submission

Proceedings

Selected papers from the conference will be published in the Special Issue "Astronomy in the Big Data Era: Perspectives" of the journal “Data” (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/data/special_issues/Astronomy_Big_Data) as regular articles. Instructions for preparing your contribution is on the web-site of the journal: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/data/instructions. The paper submission deadline is October 15th, 2020.

Other contributions will be published in the regular proceedings of Publications of Astronomical Society "Rudjer Bošković". The manuscript should be sent to Milan S. Dimitrijevic mdimitrijevic@aob.rs. The paper submission deadline is November 1st, 2020. The template for preparation of this type of papers is available at this link.

Book of abstracts

Please follow this link for book of abstracts.