July 2024 Board Meeting Notes

July 10, 2024, Board Meeting Notes

In attendance this evening:

John Blaesi, President

John Grismore, Vice President

Evan Zorn, Treasurer

Denise Gregg, Secretary

Craig Brockmeier, Board Member At Large

Brian Turner, Board Member At Large

I.   Review

A. 2nd Saturday Public Nights - many have been too cold or too cloudy

B. Dark Sky Night Parties - it has been cold or cloudy

C. Still plan to keep these going.

II. In process (see last meeting minutes) and what is status?

A. Arvest/Truity - decision to keep majority of funds in Truity Checking, $2K to start at Arvest: We decided to do this and it has been set up!  John B has a key.

B. By-laws Review (JohnB, JohnG, EvanZ) in process – update. 

1. Student memberships:  Denise said that she liked the part about student members serving as officials be allowed the same full rights as given to Regular Membership.  Denise said that she liked the part about student members not having unsupervised use of BAS facilities and equipment.  Denise said that she also liked the part about student members serving as officials be allowed the same full rights as given to Regular Membership.

2. Honorary memberships:  We discussed whether age 90 was too high for this!  We suggested age 80.

3. Deadline dates for dues not paid:  We decided that if dues are due in November, dues not paid by December would be termed delinquent, and memberships not paid by February would be termed expired.  This would match up with needing to send in the yearly AlCor report (that determines who gets the Reflector for the coming year) by mid-March. 

4. Officers—non-elected positions:  Should we have one for web administrator and/or Facebook?

5. Auditing—Denise asked if we had ever been audited; the consensus was that we had not ever been. 

6. Comments in general:  Craig suggested making up a suggested revised version of the by-laws with comments indicated in color.  He worked for many months on a revision to MSRAL by-laws and having color-coded changes was very helpful!

C. Projector Purchase (PatS) - in process – update.  Denise said she would defer to the other Board members on this!  We reviewed Pat’s recommendations to date but didn’t decide on this today.  John G suggested going to Best Buy and see if 400 lumens would be enough for a projector.  In general, we decided we needed to do more research on this.  Denise suggested talking to the Buffalo Roam film company that has moved into the First Christian Church building to see what they might recommend.

D. Telescope Library inventory - update - need a checkout process. We discussed how long people should be able to check out a telescope.  Brian suggested that we do it for at least a month, and the others agreed.  Denise said she would work on this after the August library display is over.

E. Club marketing and communications (Denise, JohnG, Katlynn)

1. Mobile Numbers and carriers are being collected

a) Text Blasting - first view nothing was cheap, everything was $X per month

b) Perhaps make a group in GMAIL? Will it work with non-gmail accounts?

c) John G has developed a method that will work within our Google account setup, and this has been tested with Board members.  When we implement this, for members, we will need to add questions about the texting service on our membership application form—do you wish to participate in this service; solicit cell number (could be more, for a family); and what the cell carrier is.  For a family, we would identify to whom each cell number/carrier belongs, and note permission given by each person.  We would need to decide a minimum age for youth; right now, the newsletter list is for youth age 13 and up, but when we had BYA meetings, youth couldn’t attend on their own until at least age 18.  We might prefer to use that higher age threshold for the texting service.  

F. Outside speaker meeting gifts

1. Heat changing astronomical coffee cups have been suggested

G.   PayPal - Status (Evan).  This is still in progress.  Craig says we need to set this up as a business account; he thinks the issues we have on our website will go away if we set our account up as a business account.

III.   New Activities

A. Where should the club donate—no decisions were made on these tonight.

1. It’s time

2. It’s funds

3. Telescopes

IV.  2024 Program Ideas

A. Eclipse Programs

1. January - Solar Eclipse Season Begins!

2. February - How to View or Photograph a Solar Eclipse

3.     March - Special NASA Videos

4. April - The eclipse that verified Einstein's Theory of Relativity

5. May - Great American Eclipse Pictures

B. Post Ecliptical Programs

1. Galaxy Clusters and Supernovae: Cosmic Probes of the Universe" by Moonzarin Reza

2. July - Planetarium Apps - Finding the universe with you mobile phone

3. August - New Telescope Technology - C-Star, StarSense etc.

a) Request for officer candidates

4. September - Slate of proposed officers Night Sky Photography or

5. October - Elections, Business Meeting, and something fun

C. Holiday Season

1. November - So you want a telescope for Christmas

2. December - Meteor Watching and Star Party

3. January - So you got a telescope for Christmas - now what!

V. Club invigoration

A. How does the club increase

1. Participation

2. Volunteering  --We noted that some younger people like Katlynn, Kate and Caleb are starting to become involved.

B. December Holiday Party

1. Girl Scout Camp  Denise mentioned that if we do a party in lieu of our usual December meeting date, that could possibly cause a problem with future first-Monday-of-the-night meetings at the library, since meeting rooms are booked well in advance at the library!

C. Dark Sky Possibilities

1. Osage Hills

2. Mike Dutcher (NE of town)

3. Katie Maynor and Caleb Rummel--(Hulah/Copan Lake)

4. Bob and Glenda Bollinger—Denise will work on this, depending on nights with less moonlight

5. Non-dark-sky-event:  Planetarium show.  Denise has not heard back from TASM; we discussed Brian looking into doing something at the Jenks planetarium. 

VI.  Other meeting ideas

A. Night Sky Photography

B. PBS - Northern Nights, Starry Skies

C. Scale of the Solar System, Scale of the Universe