May 2023 Meeting Notes
Bartlesville Astronomical Society
May 1, 2023
• Opening and Welcome
• Thank you to Denise Gregg for Zoom setup
• Welcome guests and new members. 18 in attendance this evening including three visitors (one of whom is our guest speaker) and two new members!
• Announcements
• Flower Moon - May 5
• https://www.astrobin.com/users/walkman/ - Sonny Manley
• Solar prominence - https://www.astrobin.com/oe4n4v/
• I think this is the one that caused the latest aurorae.
• Girl Scouts - April 22 at WahShahShe - Roberta Allen
• Thanks to Craig, Denise, Gil, and Meg for participating in this astronomy-themed event for Scouts.
• We had lots of fun despite the clouds! We had a total of 37 Scouts (of various age groups) and Scout leaders in the group. Craig demonstrated using a telescope indoors by mounting a picture of the Pleiades on a wall of the building we were in, opposite from where the telescope was! He also brought an electronic picture display and various printed materials that we showed to the Scouts.
• Need pictures of the night sky at magnitude 5 or so. Anyone have any?
• Neil DeGrasse Tyson in Tulsa on May 9 at 7:30 $59
• Cox Business Convention Center
• https://www.visittulsa.com/event/neil-degrasse-tyson-astronomy-bizarre/4387/
• Sunfest - June 2-4
• Need volunteers to staff the booth. Denise passed out signup sheets this evening for setup, takedown and booth staffing. Setup will be either on the afternoon of Thursday, June 1 or the morning of Friday, June 2, depending on whether our booth will be pre-assigned to us or if we choose a site ourselves (like we did last year). If we are to choose a site, we will check in and set up on the afternoon of June 1. If it will be assigned to us, we’ll check in and do setup on the morning of June 2. Booth staffing in two-hour shifts will be from 3-7 p.m. on June 2, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. on June 3, and about 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. on June 4. (The non-profit section of Sunfest doesn’t begin until noon on June 4, but we want to get there earlier.) Takedown begins at 4 p.m. on June 4.
• Library display - May
• Need people to help set it up May 2. Craig, Evan, Luann, Joann, Meg and Gil have volunteered to help. We will meet at Our Savior Lutheran at noon to collect materials and then go to the library to do setup. Takedown will be May 30 or May 31, depending on when volunteers are available.
• Anyone planning to go somewhere for the solar eclipses?
• Annular - October 14, 2023
• Total - April 8, 2024
• Tonight’s Program - “ACEAP and professional astronomy in Chile” -Byron Labadie
• ACEAP is the Astronomy in Chile Educator Ambassadors Program. This program began in 2015 and Byron was a member of this group in 2020.
• Byron showed pictures of several sites that he visited in Chile as part of this program. The group met in Santiago and traveled to other locations in Chile including Cerro Pachón, Cerro Tololo and the Atacama Desert.
• Cerro Pachón has the largest single mirror telescope in the world, a Ritchey-Chrétien Cassegrain on an alt-azimuth mount. The surface accuracy of this telescope is 0.6 millionth of an inch! The Ruben Observatory in Cerro Pachón has programs for both science educators and the general public.
• Cerro Tololo is the site of the Inter-American Observatory. This observatory has the Victor Blanco telescope, which is a twin of the Mayall 4-meter Telescope at the Kitt Peak observatory in Arizona. This telescope has a dark energy camera that can take CCD (Charged Couple Device) images with prime focus. (With prime focus photography, the camera is part of the telescope itself. It’s focused using the telescope’s focus wheel and light travels into the camera’s sensors in the telescope.) The Inter-American Observatory also has small and medium-sized astrophysical research telescopes. The Korea Microlensing Telescope Network at Cerro Tololo is dedicated to looking for exoplanets.
• After Byron visited Cerro Pachón and Cerro Tololo, he went to the Atacama Desert, which resembles the surface of Mars. NASA has a training facility in the area! This site has 66 radio telescope dishes, operated by the U.S, Europe and Japan. Transporters arrange the telescope dishes in configurations up to 16 km apart. Transportation of the telescope dishes from the low area (10,000 ft. altitude) up to the high mountain level (16,400 ft. altitude) is a complex process using wheeled transporters that can only travel about 5 km/hour. It can take most of a day to move a telescope dish from the low to the high site. The telescope dishes are very stable even though this is an earthquake-prone area; they were specially built to withstand earthquakes. The telescopes can operate in winter and in both nighttime and daytime.
• Observing and Imaging Reports
• “The History of the Milky Way” - Dr. Yutaka Hirai - Notre Dame - May 5 - 6:00pm
• Aurora pictures? None yet!
• Astronomical News and Events
• Virgil Reese—Virgil was not in attendance this evening.
• Business
• Minutes of previous meeting are posted online by Denise Gregg - Approved
• Treasurer’s Report - Evan Zorn
• Ending balance April 30, 2023, was $13198.13
• Check to John Blaesi for $24.99 to reimburse him for the dinner he bought for our February guest speaker, Gordon Meredith, and his wife, who traveled to our meeting from out of town.
• Dues payments received $105.00
• Two other donations totaling $911.52
• Check to Oklahoma Secretary of State (annual fee for our Club) $15.00.
• Ending balance April 30, 2023 is $14174.66
• Committee Reports
• Astronomical League news and activities - Denise Gregg
• MSRAL - Tulsa June 9-11, 2023
• Register at https://www.msral2023.org. Registration deadline is May 26.
• Volunteers? John Blaesi will be presenting at the event.
• ALCon - July 28-30 Albuquerque, NM
• Youth club (BYA) news - Rick Bryant—Rick was not in attendance this evening. The agenda of their April 19 meeting was discussing planning for the coming school year. At this point few families are actively participating in the BYA. We are hoping that Sunfest will bring in new members to the BYA!
• FCC - Evan Zorn
• Evan is working on getting a rent proposal from the City for storage at the FCC.
• Should we find alternate storage?
• Adjournment
• Next meeting - June 5 at library. Presentation will be by Dr. Christopher Johns-Krull of Rice University, topic TBD.
• Motion to adjourn
• Braum’s after the meeting