March 2025 Board Meeting Notes

Bartlesville Astronomical Society Board Meeting Notes

March 31, 2025

In attendance this evening:

John Grismore, President

Pat Stefanopoulos, Vice President

Evan Zorn, Treasurer

Denise Gregg, Secretary

Craig Brockmeier, Board Member At Large

Brian Turner, Board Member At Large

John Blaesi

Luann Wright

·       Visit to Bartlesville in June by Ron Carman, who is the main presenter at our Club June 2025 meeting:  We set a maximum limit of $500 for Ron Carman’s travel expenses when he comes to Bartlesville in June.  We will ask that he provide us with receipts. 

·       We agreed that we will listen to a presentation this week by Andrew Oleson of PDG+creative on the options he can provide to us to update our website. 

·       We agreed to buy a club Seestar, which will probably be used at first more for getting attention at star parties, and later as a club loaner scope.  We will wait another week or two (until after NEAF, the Northeast Astronomy Forum) to make a final decision, since new product announcements from ZWO could influence which scope we decide to get.

·       We decided to purchase a presentation video camera in the range of $350 to $700, for use in our Zoom meetings.  We will review the current options one more time, then plan our purchase at a time when we know we can get together (probably at the Library) to thoroughly test it and make sure it does what we need.  If it doesn’t work, we’ll return it.

·       The updated Membership Application Form that Denise brought to the September 24, 2024, Board meeting, but that we didn’t formally adopt at that time, was approved as presented by Denise.   The changes made by Denise were to the part where members enter their personal membership information, not to the parts for actual dues levels, terms of membership or the Liability Release Form.  She put in block characters for two email addresses and specific places for home, cell and work phone numbers.  She also added check boxes for email addresses to denote that they were for people ages 13 and up (as our newsletter subscription form does).   Copies of the updated membership form that Denise brought to the meeting were given to Evan to bring to future Club meetings.

·       We also discussed plans for a possible series of Astronomy presentations by Brian Turner as part of a summer Library program, we agreed again on the general idea of doing sidewalk astronomy events to engage the public more directly, and we briefly discussed the Billion Light Year club event, targeting either the weekend of April 18 or April 25.