October 21 2021 Board Meeting Notes

Bartlesville Astronomical Society Board Meeting Minutes

October 21, 2021

In attendance:

Craig Brockmeier

Evan Zorn

Denise Gregg

Mike Woods

Bob Young

Duane Perkins

Not in attendance:

Rick Buck

Karen Cruce

Officer nominations for 2022:

Evan agreed to be nominated for Treasurer for 2022.

Denise Gregg agreed to be nominated for Secretary for 2022.

Karen Cruce sent an email to Craig that she was going to resign her position as an At-Large member. Those in attendance suggested John Blaesi as a replacement. Craig said he would talk to John to see if he would be willing to do this. Craig said he didn’t know if Karen would want to continue as a regular Club member or not.

Appointed positions:

Bob Young said he was willing to continue to be Program Chairman, but he also asked if John Blaesi might be willing to be Program Chairman, since he has brought in outside speakers this year and has four speakers already lined up for next year. Craig asked Bob to talk to John about it.

Denise is still willing to be Web Wizard.

Meeting in person:

Mike said, as he did at the Club meeting next week, that he thought to start meeting again in person at the library in January would work, at least as of right now. We will continue to monitor this.

Mike would prefer if we could meet in meeting room A but Denise said this is booked through March 2022; we can try later to get it in April and beyond. We have meeting room C now booked for January 10.

We discussed masks. We think that some people may not want to attend if we require masks. We will table a decision on this until later. If we do want to require masks, the Club will need to get a box or two of masks. Mike said we might even be able to find disposable masks decorated with an astronomy theme!

We hope that meeting in person will encourage better attendance.

Denise said that if we don’t start meeting in person soon, that would make it less likely that we could get meeting room A when it becomes available again.

Ways to possibly improve attendance:

Shorter meetings

Get to the main meeting topic quicker—do part of the business part of the meeting before the main speaker, part after

Do the business part of the meeting on another day

Outside speakers:

We discussed trying to get more outside speakers. If we do, and if we are meeting in person, and the speaker isn’t local and wouldn’t want to come to Bartlesville, we’d need to see how we could run a Zoom meeting using a library laptop. We would need to have a Club member dedicated to the functioning of the Zoom meeting at the meeting.

Craig said that he would talk to the library about this.

Even for meetings with a local speaker, it would be nice to have a Zoom option so people outside of town like Ron can continue to attend.

Dues:

We decided to postpone asking for dues until January when we (hopefully) start meeting in person. We would ask all Club members to pay regular dues.

If that doesn’t get a good response, then we will re-evaluate. We could consider letting those members who aren’t active continue their membership but without paying dues until the next dues cycle would begin November 2022. We do have concerns, though, that the Club might be deemed too small by the Astronomical League and the NSN to receive kits and other items that they would normally send out to clubs with larger memberships.

The AlCon quarterly report we send in at the end of March is the one that determines AlCon dues for the year.

Denise pointed out that even if someone chooses to drop Club membership that they would still get the Club newsletter.

Evan mentioned that he and Denise still need to work on getting the PayPal link on the Club website to work.

Spending of Club funds:

Evan said we now have $7500.00 in Club funds. We discussed ways in which this could be spent.

Denise mentioned trying to buy adjacent land to build an observatory at Osage Hills State Park long term; Craig said this would require more active Club members than we have right now!

Craig mentioned possibly buying a setup for EAA—electronically assisted astronomy—or other astrophotography equipment.

We decided we would continue thinking about what we could do with Club money.

Library display:

Denise volunteered to head up the library display for 2022, but she said she wouldn’t want to do it by herself.

Craig said that we could put up basically the same exhibit as last year, but we would need more backdrop paper.

Denise said we would need to go to the storage room at the First Christian Church to see what is still there; Abby would have taken things she brought home, and some of the youth may have picked up their art projects and other donated items.

Craig said we would still have enough materials to do a basic display.

If we wanted to do a new theme, we would need to start thinking about that soon.

Star parties:

We discussed still having a members-only party at Jo Allyn Lowe Star Garden on October 29, as we talked about in our Club meeting last week.

We also discussed participating in the New Year’s “First Light” hike on January 1, if Osage Hills State Park is going to do it.

Girl Scout events at Wah-Shah-She:

Craig met today with Rachel (with the Girl Scouts) at Wah-Shah-She. Discussed ways in which we can help them.

Denise said she would be willing to help if the Girl Scouts decided to plan an event. Craig said he would tell the Girl Scouts that we would participate.

Next Board meeting:

January 2022