August 2022 Meeting Notes
Bartlesville Astronomical Society Meeting Minutes
August 1, 2022
• Opening and Welcome
• Thank you to Denise Gregg for Zoom setup
• 12 in attendance this evening, including two visitors
• Announcements
• September meeting Thursday 8!
• Family Stargazing program for September?
• Star Party – Friday, August 12 or Saturday, August 13 at Jo Allyn Lowe. Date will depend on the weather. Emphasis will be on the Perseid Meteor Shower. Craig had proposed doing something August 5 or 6 (Moon not as bright) instead, but we decided, at John Blaesi’s suggestion, to keep to our plan of the second weekend of the month.
• We will also try to do something at Osage Hills August 26 or 27 (new moon).
• Gary Nealis is making presentations of his days at NASA mission control.
• Sundays at 10:00 at Bambino’s
• Braum’s after the meeting
• Thoughts on loaner telescope or binoculars recommendations for 4H - Kelly Wardlaw
• Tonight’s Program
• “Astrophotography using a Star Tracker” - Rick Buck
• Rick showed us a small telescope on a mount, an Askar FMA 180 telescope, that has a camera attached. It’s designed particularly to get pictures of entire nebulae, and regions of the sky that are larger than you can photograph using more traditional telescopes. It’s not intended to get detailed pictures of planets, although it will get good pictures of the Moon. This equipment is small enough to fit in a backpack when folded up! Rick has enjoyed using it, and he credited Rick Bryant with telling him about this type of equipment. It doesn’t have a GoTo tracker and can’t be used for automatically finding objects, but it does have a star tracker that will follow objects across the sky, once you have focused on something.
• Observing and Imaging Reports
• Had a star party at Wah-Shah-She with the Girl Scouts
• Approximately 25 girls. Everyone seemed to enjoy the evening and we were able to do some observing—the weather wasn’t as cloudy as had been predicted, although there were clouds.
• We would like to do another observing event with the Girl Scouts this fall when it gets dark earlier.
• They also said that they would like to make Wah-Shah-She available to us for our star parties. We would of course coordinate this in advance with them.
• Woolaroc would like a star party.
• We decided to do this on this fall’s Astronomy Day, October 1. Denise will notify Jan Tucker at Woolaroc.
• Astrophotography images – Rick. Rick combined this into his program for the evening.
• Astronomical News and Events
• John Blaesi and John Grismore. This month: Perseid Meteor Shower. Start watching now, and through August 13/14. Last year there was an unexpected Perseid outburst on the morning of August 14 (after midnight), which is past the usual peak time of the Perseids.
• Business
• Minutes of both the June and July meetings were approved as posted online by Denise Gregg
• Treasurer’s Report - Evan Zorn
• The balance June 30, 2022 was $10,359.40.
• We paid $135 in A.L. annual dues.
• We received $25 in dues payments.
• July 31, 2022 ending balance $10,249.40.
• Committee Reports
• Astronomical League news and activities - Denise Gregg
• MSRAL - Tulsa June 9-11, 2023. Craig will call John Land and say that we would like to participate in the organizational meetings for MSRAL. Likely venues will be the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, Jenks Planetarium and their observatory in Mounds. At this point we don’t know if any parts of MSRAL will be broadcast via Zoom.
• ALCon was July 28-30 in Albuquerque, NM. It was an in-person-only event.
• Youth club (BYA) news - Rick Bryant—Rick was not in attendance this evening. Craig shared that Rick isn’t planning to have an August meeting, but he will in September and position it as a “refresh” on the youth group. Many who previously regularly attended have left, so he wants to start afresh. He will survey the people on the youth newsletter list and it’s possible they may select a different date/time to meet.
• Library Display
• May 2023? Denise received the application form for this last week. She will submit it to the library and ask for May as 1st choice, April 2nd, no third choice at this time as we might need the telescopes in March. Same theme as this year and will refresh with new pictures as we get them!
• FCC - Evan Zorn
• Evan called Mike Bailey’s office last week. He’s on vacation and will be back this week, and Evan hopes to speak with him this week. Elaine, Mike’s assistant, said Mike met with their consultant July 6, but no decision was made on the FCC at that time, and nothing has changed so far. Mike and the consultant plan to meet again to discuss this, but a date has not yet been set.
• New alarm settings? Craig went by the FCC during the day recently and an alarm went off as he entered the building. This was new—before, an alarm wouldn’t go off if he entered during the day.
• What to do with old telescopes? One option that John Blaesi has reported to us is that the Oklahoma City club will take any equipment we’d like to donate to them, and they’ll even send a truck to come pick it up. Denise pointed out that this might be better than donating older equipment to people in Bartlesville and then have them call us trying to make it work or get repair parts. If we do donate equipment, that would reduce the amount of storage space that we need and if we end up having to get a storage room on our own, it would be less expensive. We need to review what is there now.
• New Business
· We can request a speaker for free through the Night Sky Networ,k to speak at a Club event September through November. We will request a speaker for our October meeting (first choice) or November (second choice). We can invite the Tulsa club to attend, and Brian Turner can invite his OWU students. We will also put out publicity. The NSN offers a choice of presentation topics. We will ask for one of two types of presentations:
o A presentation combining their topics of Solar System Astronomy and Exoplanets and Exoplanet Formation into one on our own solar system, and is their life out there?
o Large Scale Structure of the Universe—but with an emphasis on Cosmology
• TASM Planetarium? January/February? Need to get more people participating in Club events before we can think about doing something like this.
• Tri County Tech - new parking lot lighting is very bright. If we have another event there, we will ask if the lights can be turned off for the time we expect to be there. Lights go off at midnight but they are motion-sensitive so will turn on again if motion is detected.
• Adjournment
• Next meeting Thursday, September 8 at library. Topic is Star Gazing - Craig
• Ice cream at Braum’s!!!
• Motion to adjourn