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Bartlesville Astronomical Society Meeting Minutes
June 7, 2021
• Opening and Welcome
• Thank you to Denise Gregg for Zoom setup
• 7 people in attendance including one recurring visitor (charter Club member)
• Announcements
• Library still unavailable for meetings.
• We will continue to have meetings via Zoom, through August at least
• They are currently allowing meetings of 10 or fewer people until library closes at 7:00
• Thanks to John Grismore, John Blaesi, Mike Woods, and others for the Shut-in Newsletter and our regular newsletter
• Minutes of previous meeting are posted online by Denise Gregg - Approved
• Treasurer’s Report - Evan Zorn:
• $4940.47 ending balance April 30
• May deposit from Amazon Smile $8.27
• Ending balance May 31 $4948.74
• Committee Reports
• Astronomical League news and activities – Denise Gregg. Denise will attend the June 26 annual MSRAL meeting, to be held via Zoom.
• Youth club (BYA) news - Rick Bryant. Rick was not in attendance.
• Library Display - Update
• Thank you to everyone involved with the library display!
• We have received several compliments about the exhibit, which we took down May 26. One person said it was the best exhibit the library had had in a long time!
• If you have items on display, plan to pick them up at the First Christian Church later.
• Thank you to John Blaesi, Abby Bollenbach, Craig Brockmeier, Denise Gregg and Evan Zorn for their help!!!
• We had a story about the Club and picture of Craig using the Club telescope in the Examiner-Enterprise. It was a great article that not only discussed the library exhibit but also Club history (the newspaper spoke with Ronald Carman) and our work with Osage Hills State Park (the newspaper spoke with John Blaesi).
• Dark Sky committee - John Blaesi
• We made sky quality measurements at OHSP. 21.3 or better
• Need volunteers to take measurements monthly
• bvilleastro+darksky@gmail.com
• Old Business
• Sunfest was a great success! We estimate that we had 130 visitors to our booth. Twelve people signed up to get the newsletter and ten also asked to receive the youth newsletter. Everyone at Sunfest was smiling, happy, and just glad to be there! Thanks go to Craig, Evan, Bob, Karen and Denise for working more shifts than they had signed up for. (Hopefully next year we will have more volunteers.) Thanks go to Craig for directing setup and takedown of the canopy and for making our new banner of photographs of astronomical objects taken by Rick Buck—it was a great attention-getter! Craig also laminated the photographs to put on the Sunfest table—they were also good conversation-starters. We also put out a laminated copy of John Blaesi’s and John Grismore’s Osage Hills trifold they made last year, which stimulated discussions with visitors. Denise met someone at another Sunfest booth whose husband was a student of Dr. James Van Allen at the University of Iowa!
• We purchased a new star diagonal for the 9.25 Celestron Evolution telescope
• New Business
• Get an iPad to control new telescope?
• Need Astronomical League coordinator - Kristi Herrman. Denise Gregg is filling in.
• Need web wizard and social media wrangler - Derek Herrman. Denise Gregg is filling in. Need someone with Facebook and Twitter skills
• Website migration from classic to new google sites is underway. John Grismore, Denise Gregg, and Craig are working on this
• Our old bvilleastro@yahoo.com email address – Denise will have Yahoo delete it
• At Sunfest, the Kiwanis approached us about having a booth at Freedom Fest at Sooner Park on July 4 from 7-10 p.m. Those who worked our Sunfest booth discussed it and we thought it best not to do it—considering the time it would take to get the booth supplies, set it up and take it down, it really wouldn’t be worth it. We agreed at tonight’s meeting not to do this.
• The Bartlesville Library is doing a survey to help them with future planning for the library. If you would like to take the survey, here is the link:
• John Grismore discussed a meeting that he and John Blaesi had with Lisa Beeman, who works with Bartlesville city parks.
• They told Lisa that we would like to have an observatory at Jo Allyn Lowe Park to use for casual stargazing. They also told her that our Club is working with Osage Hills State Park to have it designated as a Dark Sky Park, to be used as a community resource out of town.
• Lisa’s response to them was very positive; she very much liked our library display and the article we had in the Examiner-Enterprise; those really paved the way for the meeting with Lisa!
• At Jo Allyn Lowe, they would like to use an area north of Pathfinder, on the southern half of a hill near the park’s arboretum.
• Funding would be needed to mow the area up to 100 feet out, keep it mowed, and put in an observatory.
• Lisa said that she is familiar with dark-sky-friendly lighting and recommends them for use in new non-residential areas.
• We would need to have a shield to block excess light coming from the current parking lot lights, or we would need to replace the parking lot lights.
• We would also need to establish a light barrier (hedge or fence) to counteract the light from car headlights.
• All of this would need to be approved by the Park Board.
• John said that some older documents had been recently discovered that stipulated that construction was not to be done in the park after it was set up; the gardens that are there now are actually in violation of this. John said that these documents would be reviewed though, and we would have to see if the plan to have an observatory would be deemed permissible in light of these documents.
• John Grismore and John Blaesi plan to attend the Park Board meeting on June 17.
• Astronomy News and Events
• Astronomy News - Abby Bollenbach
• Abby was not in attendance, but she is continuing to make presentations for Astronomy magazine. The latest are “The Science of Star Wars” and “The Cosmic Microwave Background”
• View at http://astronomy.com select the Videos tab
• Astronomy Club of Tulsa -
• Members-only observing night Friday, June 4
• OKC Astronomy Club June 11
• The OKC Club recently had a swap meet.
• Cosmosphere
• Liberty Bell heading to Sao Paulo, Brazil in June
• Not sure about when the next Coffee at the Cosmo will be
• Buy one get one free admission on Father’s Day
• Free admission for current military members and their families until Labor Day
• http://www.cosmo.org
• Kalamazoo Astronomical Society Zoom meetings - kasonline.org
• Most recent meeting was June 4 with the main presentation on Cosmic Instability, presented by Dr. John C Mather, James Webb Telescope project scientist and Nobel Prize winner in Physics
• An Astrophotography Special Interest group may be forming in September.
• Meteor showers: Nothing of note this month
• AlCor 2021 August 19-21 in Albuquerque
• Upcoming astronomical events
• Summer Solstice - June 21
• Club Events
• Sunfest - June 4-6 - Thank you for helping!
• Star parties: Rick Buck
• Girl Scout Observing Event at Wah-Shah-She:
• May 15 Rained out
• Tried for June 5 - Clouded out. The intent was to meet at 6:30 for setup. Rick Buck, Rick Bryant and Craig were to have participated. The GSA contact was Maureen of the Tulsa GSA. The Scouts were to possibly have had an eVscope.
• Star Party for Dewey School - TBA
• St. Lukes - TBA
• Wayside school - TBA
• Save the date for August 9 and 19—possible good nights to view Jupiter’s moons eclipsing each other.
• Osage Hills First Light - Next year!
• John Blaesi - upcoming events
• OHSP observing next week during new moon?
• OHSP - 21.5 on SQM means magnitude 6.5 to naked eye
• Member photos - none this evening, apart from the main program
• Tonight’s Program: Tonight’s program was a selection of photographs taken by Bob Young at Sunfest. These were presented by Denise as Bob was not in attendance.
• Next meeting - July 5
• Topic TBD
• Volunteers needed for upcoming meetings - Bob Young
• Motion to adjourn
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