Champaign Urbana Astronomical Society
Monthly meeting - April 12th, 2001

Minutes taken by Phil Wall, secretary.

Members attending: 12
Visitors attending: 0

- To open the meeting, Wayne read a poem about the solar max. It rhyhmed a lot.

- Dave Leake, treasurer and preparer of the newsletter, said that the
  newsletter was late this month because the machine he uses at the Park
  District office is broken.

- Geoff Burch, president, then went through the list of upcoming events of
  interest.

- Geoff talked briefly about the Messier Hunt last month. Because of the
  cold and wind, only three members went out, and all gave up by 9 pm.

- We discussed getting building a deck or getting a stepladder for the new
  pier at the dome site. Mike Rosenberger, observatory director, says he
  doesn't think we need one except for viewing objects close to the horizon.
  Geoff and the others tried out the pier at the Messier Hunt and got out
  the old stairs for the dome to use for the pier.

- The 28th is National Astronomy Day. 150 notices about our family skywatch
  were sent to 150 Girl Scouts, so we may experience crowds at the skywatch
  on the 28th.

- We discussed keeping tallies of guests at skywatches and methods including
  taking names, but we decided that just getting a rough guess-timate would
  be good enough, as long as we recorded it each skywatch.

- We discussed getting a new log book for the dome and a plastic file to
  keep it in and the field mice out. Mike Rosenberger says he uses a plastic
  file for papers in his metal shed, and it works fine. He also said metal
  files would sweat. The decision was made to get the log book and file,
  and Dave Leake will get them.

- Geoff mentioned an astronomical tour starting in Los Angeles this August
  that would visit various astronomical points of interest in the Southwest.

- T shirt orders were taken at the end of the meeting: we have orders for
  11. To qualify for the discount to get shirts at $9 each, we need to
  order 36. We decided that if we got 20 orders, the club would buy the
  rest and we'd sell them at meetings and events like Taste of Chmapaign.

- Once again, Phil Wall, secretary, forgot to have the Constellation of
  the Month ready for the meeting. Reason given: he "spaced out" on it.
  He was threatened with lashes, but whether for forgetting or making a
  bad pun was unclear.

- The next CUAS board meeting will be on May 5th at The Village Inn Pizza
  Parlor at 7pm. They are open again.

- For most of the meeting, we watched a video about the Tsunguska Siberian
  explosion in 1908, which Jeff Bryant, vice president, brought in.

- Note to Chris Pond, webmaster (by request of Geoff): Please put the URL
  of the T Shirt graphic on our website. Dave will provide the graphic.



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Philip J. Wall                          "Fifty points for House Gryffindor"
pwall@argus-systems.com
Trusted Systems Engineer, Argus Systems Group, Inc.