Minutes from the April CAAS Meeting

John Reed called the meeting to order at 7:20, the nice weather and good food enticed us to run late.  There were 25 members and visitors in attendance.

John told us about several upcoming start parties:

  • The Nebraska Star Party on July 25th (http://www.nebraskastarparty.org/)
  • The Texas Star Party on June 1 (http://www.texasstarparty.org/index1.html)
  • The All-America Star Party (date unknown).

Closer to home, the Red River Astronomy Club is having one of their Burger Burn star parties on May 3rd.

On May 10th, CAAS will join the Pinnacle Mountain State Park to hold an Astronomy Day event.  We’ll start  at 2 PM for solar observing and bubble making and then later we’ll have scopes out for night time astronomy.  Since this event falls on our normal meeting night, we will hold a short business meeting before the night time events start.

For our presentation, Rocky Togni gave a very interesting presentation on “space” stamps.  Postage stamps that were created with space travel themes, mostly real but some fanciful.  It was very entertaining and afterward he gave out stamps to the children there.

Afterward we went to the observing field and socialized and observed.

Jim Dixon

Regular Monthly CAAS Meeting

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Join us this coming Satuday, April 12th at 7 PM, for the next CAAS meeting. We will be at our normal location, River Ridge Observatory. If you need directions, click the contact button.

The meeting will be preceded by a potluck dinner at about 6 PM.

Presentation: The Space Race and Philately by Rocky Togni   

Timothy Ferris opened his book “Seeing in the Darkâ€? with the excitement of the late 50’s and Sputnik. Living near Cape Canaveral (Now Cape Kennedy) he witnessed many of the U.S. launches in those exciting early days. The Space Race between the United States and Russia served to propel the technologies of both countries and you could say substituted for the Nuclear war between the two super powers that fortunately never happened. It also propelled many youngsters into technological careers and hobbies such as Astronomy. Rocky Togni will present the Space Race as seen through the stamp issues of each country at our regular monthly meeting Saturday April 12. There will be Space stamps for all kids who attend.

Moon Occults Pleiades April 8th

The Moon will partially obscure the Pleiades during the early evening of April 8. The event starts between 8:30 CDT and lasts about 2 hours depending on your definition of “Pleiades”. It looks like only one of the Seven Sisters will be occulted but several minor members will be obscured by the Moon. If you have a webcam or video camera, this might be a good opportunity to capture some occultation footage. In the image below, the lower Moon is at 8:30 and the higher reflects where it will be 2 hours later.
Moon Occults Pleiades!