We have rescheduled the November club meeting for November 18. I will be at a conference the
week before, so the dome is unavailable.
At this time, the club doesn’t have a nominee for president at the November election. Dave
Leake checked the by-laws, and they state that “If an office remains vacant after an election,
nominations will be taken immediately with an election to occur the next month.”
The first Kaler Science Lecture back in the dome went well. I think some of our usual lecture audience didn’t realize that our shows are currently starting a half hour earlier, but it wasn’t a major problem. I haven’t seen how Parkland College Television’s production of the video looks, but I
will share the links when I can.
October wasn’t very lucky for our public observing events, but Guy Hampel reminded me about
a practice we tried to start a couple years ago. Members have volunteered to run a session the
weekend of November 13. Let’s make it a two-night event where Friday (11/12) is the first
attempt and Saturday (11/13) is the backup.
Melanie Archipley gave a very nice talk for us at our meeting on October 14. Unfortunately, I had
some issues with Zoom, and my wife told me it was likely caused by outdated software.
Our speaker for November 18 had to cancel because she moved from Champaign to work on the
Gemini telescope in Hawai’i. Hopefully, she can give us a talk next year after she has settled into
paradise. We may be able to get a new speaker to help promote the launch of the James Webb
Space Telescope. If not, I’ll give a talk about Uranus.
If you are reading the newsletter around
Hallowe’en, you might consider using a
stencil that was designed to look like the
JWST’s eight-meter mirror. You can find
more patterns at this link. https://
go.nasa.gov/3BspuMp
Thanks again to Jeff Kouzmanoff for arranging a new email list for us. It allowed
us to have a good discussion about the
club making a future purchase of a Unistellar telescope. One of our members,
Paul Smith, owns the eVscope and is willing to show it to the club to give members
a more informed opinion. There may be
some discussion of this in the hour before
our meeting usually starts on November 18. I hope we can learn more about the costs and the
learning curve necessary for members to use a drive system, a MallinCam, and a Pico projector.
Having something that would be portable enough to take to the parks in town would be great.
Let’s keep talking about this.
Clear skies!
Erik