President’s Message

The members of the Champaign–Urbana Astronomical Society mourn the pass-ing of Doug Rokke. In the last few years, Doug has been a very active member of our club, providing significant material assistance for our award-winning floats at the Inde-pendence Day parades, giving talks at club meetings, and as-sisting with public outreach events. He clearly loved astrono-my and he shared that passion with his children and grandchil-dren. We thank him for his efforts and we send our condo-lences to his family.
January is often a quiet month for astronomy in east central Illinois. The nights are usually cloudy, which we had for about two weeks stretching back to Christmas Eve. I’m sure many of us would be discouraged from observing on the few clear nights due to the tem-peratures, but I hope those of you who were brave enough to set up a telescope got some good views.
Thanks to Dave Leake for sharing an overview of 2021’s night sky events with us at our last club meeting. I was glad to see some guests joined us, so we will post links to future meetings on our website and on Facebook. If you weren’t able to join us, we recorded Dave’s presentation and Jeff Kouzmanoff posted the video on our website.
We have invited a speaker from Wisconsin for our next meeting. On February 11 at 7 p.m. CST, Adam McCulloch from Geneva Lake Astrophysics and STEAM (GLAS) will talk about the history of observations at Yerkes Observatory. I expect this will whet our appetites to visit the facility when it reopens. You can see how GLAS is continuing the public outreach at glaseducation.org. You can check yerkesobservatory.org for more developments about the building.
Clear skies!
Erik

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