May 2015 Board Meeting

Present at meeting, May 14, 2015:

Elected Officers:

President--Steve Plank

Vice President--Virgil Reese

Secretary--Denise Gregg

Treasurer--Vicky Travaglini

Appointed:

Newsletter--Mike Woods

Website--John Grismore

Program Chair--Bob Young

Meeting room arrangement--Daryl Doughty

Online Media--Racheeta Agrawal

Observing program--Steve Plank (for now)

Member at large:

Craig Brockmeier

Not present:

Member at large--Duane Perkins

Topics discussed:

• Need to get a new permanent Observing Program “appointed” person. Steve mentioned Evan Zorn; he's had some discussions with him that might indicate an interest. Evan has also volunteered to do dismantling at Sunfest and that would give Steve an opportunity to visit with him about this. Denise also mentioned the idea of one or two people organizing an individual event, but we would still need an overall coordinator who would appoint people to specific projects.

• Telescopes club has--what do we do with them? The club has a number of them; John has a detailed inventory. We have one telescope, a 12-inch reflector, that isn’t bad looking. We one or two 4 to 6-inch Newtonian scopes that are of no marketable value. We have an 8-inch reflector scope. We have 1 or 2 70-mm refractor scopes. We have tripods for all but one scope. Should we give scopes to club members, sell them to club members at a nominal cost, or set up a "lending library" of scopes? If we go with a lending library, the question would still remain, where would we keep them permanently? (Right now they are in a shed at Mike Woods' house.) Or should we sell them in bulk to the Tulsa Astronomy Club? Denise mentioned contacting her Girl Scout contact to see if they might want some at Wah-Shah-She. (Note: Denise has thought about this some more and decided to wait to see if we might offer them to members first before offering to the Scouts.) If we got a commercial storage unit for the scopes it would cost $47.00 a month.

• Telescope the club would like to get: A large Dobb with go-to capability. Cost would be around $1800.00 Members donate say $50 per member?

• Where/what should be the repository for club information? It was generally agreed to do it online as much as possible and scan documents where possible, but the question is-- do we continue to use Google (which we have been) that is free, or connect with NASA’s Night Sky Network? We have boxes of club information in various places. Some of it can be scanned, but other portions, such as books, wouldn’t lend themselves to scanning. Some of the information would be financial records that it might be worth getting a safe deposit box for. Where could we store information that isn’t readily scannable? Library? Bartlesville History Museum? Denise said she would look into these two possible storage venues. Since we have an Arvest bank account, that might lend itself to getting an Arvest safe deposit box for some records if it wouldn’t be too expensive.

• Website redesign--Racheeta and John have looked at what we have. We should all look at it, as well as other websites, and tell them what we like/don’t like about ours and other web sites.

• More on the Night Sky Network: This idea was brought up 3 years ago but has never got off the ground. It is put out by Nasa for astronomy clubs and gets pretty involved once you get into it; so far no one has been interested. If you join and host 5 events a year you qualify for gifts. By the time Sunfest is over we will have done 5 events this year already (2 star parties open to public, Kane star party, Civitan presentation, Sunfest). Through the organization we can get astronomical kits. We would also have access to (and have our events put on) public and private calendars. We could also use this membership as a way to encourage new members to join.

• Proposed financial budget from Vicky for fiscal year July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016 was unanimously accepted.

Income:

Dues $650; donations $25, total $675.

• Expenses:

Liability insurance due in September--$350.

OK SOS Charitable Org Registration due in March: $15.

Sunfest booth due in April: $30.

Astronomical League dues due in June, $175.

Newsletter/postage costs: $30.

Club forms printing costs: $50.

Program/education costs: $50. Total: $700.

• Sunfest—Denise outlined plans and staffing for booth and for the posters she is making. We could still use another person for some slots. It was suggested that to avoid having to bring handouts each day, we could store them overnight in a plastic kitchen garbage bag and anchor to the ground at night with rocks. (Assuming a dry weekend.) Denise will call people for open staffing slots.

• Dewey school program request: Virgil is working this; do next school year.

• Racheeta has gotten us on a Bartlesville visitors’ website.

• We should make a trifold leaflet about the club. Virgil has offered to get started on it. He volunteered John to finish it.

• We need a club logo. We might be able to go to Steven Graham with the Art Association (he took photographs at the Kane sc hool start party; that’s where he teaches) to help with it or perhaps he could suggest someone in the Art Association.

• Daryl offered to do a program on planetary imagery in August.

• Rick will do photographic image processing presentation in June.

• The cookies at the last meeting came from Kane Elementary.

• There was some discussion about the order of topics at our meetings. Some suggestions—do the business part last? Craig suggested trying to get through it more quickly in order to get to the astronomy news and main presentation faster, which is what guests come for. If we upload presentations to our Google drive before a monthly meeting that would speed connectivity to the presentation during the meeting.

• Racheeta worked with us on accessing our board and member groups on Google and our Google board documents site.

• Bvilleastro-members@googlegroups.com

• Bvilleastro-board@googlegroups.com

• To get into groups: groups.google.com

• Storage area: drive.google.com.

• You can save a contact in gmail for board and members.

• We need to get some of the older distribution lists updated with current email addresses. Some have changed what email addresses they would like for the club to use.

• We need to be careful what we put out on sites like twitter and facebook (for public access).