The WHAC Meeting was held on January 8, 2008 in the Hualalai conference room at the W.M. Keck Observatory Headquarters in Waimea.

Doug Summers facilitated the club meeting. He opened the meeting with a welcome to all members both new and old. Those new to WHAC were asked to introduce themselves to the club. There were about 28 members in attendance, with 8 new faces. Doug also wanted to know how many of the new attendees learned of this meeting on the radio. None of them did, most of them read the announcement of this meeting in the WHT newspaper. This meeting was scheduled to be held at CFHT headquarters, but due to time constraints of the CFHT host for the present year, the entire schedule of meetings for the 2008 was swapped, but keeping the rotation between the 2 places. Then he asked for observing reports since the last meeting. Our star party was cloudy, very little observing, but interesting and lively discussions on metaphysics, religion, etc. Cliff reported that after the star party it cleared at his house in Waikoloa and he did nice observing of several objects until 4:30 in the morning.

Cliff Livermore presented our regular feature: The Sky This Month
Cliff presented the sky for tonight using the display of the "Where the Stars Are" program. In the north part of the sky the following objects can be seen, Ursa Minor is just beginning to come up, Cygnus is pretty much setting now, Cassiopeia is nice and high and Perseus, in the southern sky the sculptor galaxy (NGC 253), Orion is nicely placed, the Orion nebula and the Horsehead, in the east, Sirius is coming up pretty nicely, the Pleiades, M37, Andromeda is starting going down, M31 and its companion, the whole sky for the evening has a lot of nice things available for observation.
Special this month, the moon 1st quarter on the 15th and full moon on 22nd , on the 21st Mercury will be the highest it gets, so it will be possible to see Mercury in the western sky just after sunset. On the 1st of February Venus and Jupiter will be less than a degree apart. On the night of the 18th there will be an occultation of the moon with the Pleiades. On the 17th of this month the tilt of the rings of Saturn is beginning to come edge on, so for a couple of months the Cassini division can be seen fairly well. And as the rings come on edge you can see the transits of the moons and this month it is going to be a transit of Titan. This summarizes mostly what happens this month in the sky, except for some comets. Comet Holmes has become at least one or two magnitudes fainter than was a couple of months ago. It is moving fast and getting near the sun now. Andrew pointed out that it is only to be observable until mid February. Information about the comets can be found on the Club Web page.
Now Cliff asked to change the display to the next day early morning and to the South. Here at 5:00 AM we can just barely see the Southern Cross and Vela and coming up Omega Centauri, the Jewel Box, and Eta Carinae. As the months pass we can see these interesting objects earlier in the night and when we get to the April star party this stuff will be coming up nice at 9:00 in the evening. In the East we have Venus near Scorpio, also M13. Northern objects at this time in the morning about 2:00, we can see a nebula in Draco, M82 and M81 which are very nice. M101 is faint but is very interesting and M51 is fabulous. M106 which is also a very nice galaxy and of course you've got in the West all the nice galaxies in Leo, Virgo and in Coma Berenices. The spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is wonderful that is seen edge on and for that reason is called the "Needle Galaxy". So the sky is beginning to become extremely good for galaxy buffs like Cliff that have big aperture telescopes. Cliff highly recommended the Astronomy magazine that gives you a wonderful rundown of the all special events for the month.

Social Break 15 Minutes.

Featured Talk: "The evolution of the modern large telescope"
Josh Walawender presented the evolution of the telescope starting at the beginning of the last century with the the 100-inch Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory. It was the largest telescope in the world until 1948 when the 200-inch telescope was built on Mount Palomar. This era of telescope can be called the equatorial giants and goes until the CFHT was built, and is characterized by telescopes with big equatorial mounts and large and heavy primary mirrors. The main advances in this epoch were improving the thermal expansion characteristic of the mirror and smaller focal length that facilitates the construction of the telescope, manual tracking, no computer control and the discovery of excellent observing places in northern and southern hemisphere. By the late 70's people start moving away from this classic mounts and start designing telescopes with Altazimuth mounts. The altazimuth mount is lightweight and easy to use with simple up/down left/right motions. This doesn't naturally track the stars with a single motor, so a computer was necessary to control the motors of the 2 axis. During this time new ideas start to come up to design and build large and thin mirrors. Now we have three ways to build this big mirrors: segmented mirrors like Keck, Meniscus mirrors and spin cast, this mirrors need to have a complex mirror support system to keep the shape of the reflecting surface. The Europeans also built large telescope holding meniscus mirrors that are presently in operations in Chile. The VLT very large telescope consists of four 8-meter telescopes that can also work in interferometry mode. The future holds even larger telescopes. There are presently two US-based projects. One is the 30 meter telescope, "TMT", headed by the University of California and Caltech, and the Giant Magellan Telescope by the University of California and the Carnegie Observatory. Eventually the US National Observatory will participate in one of these projects. Mauna Kea is one of final sites under selection for the TMT, 3 others are on Chile and one in Mexico.

Club Business, Craig Nance will host the next meeting at the CFHT headquarters on Tuesday February 12, 2008 at 7pm. Andrew volunteered to do the Sky Tonight and Cliff is going to bring his telescope and demonstrate how to do the alignment and observing with his telescope.

The full meeting agenda is on the WHAC web site. The traditional pre-meeting dinner is at 6pm at the Parker Ranch Food Court.