September 2022 Meeting Notes
Bartlesville Astronomical Society
September 8, 2022
• Opening and Welcome
• Thank you to Denise Gregg for Zoom setup
• Seven in attendance this evening, 4 in person, 3 via Zoom. No guests.
• Announcements
• Star Party - Friday or Saturday September 9 or 10—we decided to do Sept. 16 or 17 due to brighter Moon on September 9 or 10.
• Denise will contact Bob Young about having an International Observe the Moon Night star party at Our Savior Lutheran (members-only star party)
• 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: “Stargazing” – Craig
• Craig reviewed suggested tools for stargazing, for personal comfort when viewing as well as binoculars and night sky references. For personal comfort, he suggested things like a comfortable chair that reclines and sweater/jacket/cap if it’s cold. He mentioned bringing a flashlight and red-light flashlight, and a notebook and pen.
• Recommended binoculars include 7 X 50, 10 X 50 and 15 X 70 sizes. Image-stabilized binoculars are particularly helpful.
• Night sky references include planispheres, the skymaps.com monthly star chart and various apps, such as SkySafari Plus and SkySafari Pro and Heavens-Above.
• Craig showed us a Messier chart he found that lists them by how easy they are to observe!
• Resource for this presentation: Take Your Family Stargazing by Eric Schreur
• Observing and Imaging Reports
• Woolaroc would like a star party
• October 1? October 22?
• Astrophotography images – Rick—Rick was not in attendance this evening.
• Astronomical News and Events
• John Blaesi and John Grismore—we didn’t discuss these this evening
• Business
• Minutes of previous meeting are posted online by Denise Gregg – Approved for both July and August
• Treasurer’s Report - Evan Zorn—Evan wasn’t in attendance this evening. Will have update at October meeting.
• We have changed our insurance provider from Mercer to State Farm. This will bring our policy into compliance with recommended coverages. This change will also give us a local contact, which will be good. Our new policy will be $14.00 a year more than we were paying to Mercer. Those in attendance at the meeting approved the new insurance policy with State Farm. A big thank-you to Evan and Craig for contacting State Farm and working on this!
• Committee Reports
• Astronomical League news and activities - Denise Gregg
• MSRAL - Tulsa June 9-11, 2023
• Volunteers?
• ALCon - July 28-30 - Albuquerque, NM
• Youth club (BYA) news - Rick Bryant—Rick was not in attendance this evening. He plans for a fall kickoff meeting to be September 19, and will do a “restart” of the youth group, since some former members have graduated or moved away.
• Library Display
• Denise filed the application for 2023, with first choice May, second choice April.
• FCC - Evan Zorn
• If we try to enter the FCC, we need to notify Mike Bailey with the City first, so he can arrange for the alarm not to go off.
• What to do with old telescopes? Possibility of donating to Oklahoma City club.
• Craig and Denise went to the City Council meeting Sept. 6. We can still use the FCC for now, but we don’t know how long that will continue. The FCC isn’t going to be made into a conference center right away—the costs are high—but the city will be accepting requests from organizations to rent space. We think we should start looking for another place to store equipment, but we should try to reduce our inventory first, so we will need less space.
• New Business
· Night Sky Network speaker available for October 3 meeting—Dr. Antony Stark, who works at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian. He is an expert on the Large Scale Structure of the Universe and is a founder and designer of the South Pole Telescope (SPT). Here is what his talk is about: Astronomy's Final Frontier: The Dark Ages at High Redshift. Between the emission of the Cosmic Microwave Background 380,000 years after the Big Bang and the galaxies a billion years later are the Dark Ages when the first stars were born. We can see what came before, and what came after this epoch, but there are mysteries to be cleared up. How did the first stars form, and what were they like? How did the black holes in the center of galaxies get so large so fast? But these observations are very hard: it's far away, highly redshifted, and faint. These are the targets for the newly-launched James Webb Space Telescope, a new generation of giant optical telescopes, and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array. Gravitational lensing helps magnify the earliest, tiny galaxies.
• We can tell others about this special talk, such as Tulsa Club, Oklahoma City Club and Kyle at the TASM, and the homeschool group that recently contacted us.
• TASM Planetarium?
• Tri County Tech - New parking lot lighting is very bright at night. If plan any future star parties there, ask if lighting can be turned off for the evening until after we think we’ll have left.
• Eclipse Ambassadors program—Craig was emailed about this by the Astronomy Society of the Pacific. This program pairs members of astronomy clubs with undergraduate and graduate students. If you are interested in this, contact Craig.
• We need someone to do Facebook and Twitter for the Club. Karen has advised us that she will no longer be able to do this.
• Adjournment
• Next meeting Monday, October 3, at the library and via Zoom, with Dr. Antony Stark presenting via Zoom.
• Ice cream at Braum’s!!!
• Motion to adjourn