Minutes from the August 2010 meeting

What a great night on our Sat. 14 Aug meeting. Carolaina opened the board and Jim Fisher brought the documents that hopefully will fix our non-profit status (THANK YOU Jim!). John Reed showed his excellent PPT brief about astronomy, which had about 50 pictures taken by CAAS and other AR astronomers… all local talent!

We had many guests Saturday night:  Seth and Cassandra Bailey; Krystal and Marc; and the whole family of Andy Reed also were there.

Other CAAS members there were Don Lewis; Jim and Samantha Dixon, Eric Walker, Carolaina and Don Ferren, John Reed, Rocky and Carol Togni, Bill Sanders; Pat and Sandy Morris; Coy Scott…and me.

Our Japanese guests from earlier in the week gave us 20 Japanese printed towels as a Thank You for the fantastic Meteor Star Party 2 days previous…they went quick!

The awesome benefit of a scorching week of heat…low humidity at night! Evening temps dropped; “Seeing/no clouds” was really good, but Transparency was average. We had such a great time, Coy Scott, Carolaina and Don Ferren stayed until about 2 a.m. and Don Lewis and myself stayed until sunrise!

Highlights of the evening were Stephen’s Quintet and seeing the moon “Io” (and it’s shadow next to it!) transit the full color face of Jupiter. We saw Neptune, and with the Starry Night Pro Plus software, we sorted and saw Pluto. The Gravitational Lens in Pegasus eluded us…grrrr. The Veil Nebula was fantastic.

The list of other Planetary Nebula, Galaxies, Globular Clusters is too long to be believed… we rocked the CAAS grounds until the telescope police came!

p.s. No Special Forces armadillos nor ninja raccoons when you have boisterous astro buddies with you all night!  Great times…

Blue Skies
Bill