The WHAC meeting was held at the CFHT Headquarters in Waimea. We thank CFHT for providing an excellent meeting room complete with the finest of teas and snacks!
The meeting was called to order at 7pm by Pierre Martin. There were about 20 persons in attendance. Pierre started with introductions and welcomed a few new faces.
Pierre asked for any
observing reports. Craig Nance discussed the SMART moon impact event he hosted at his house.
There were about a half-dozen WHAC'os there. No, the lunar impact was not seen, but it was fun trying.
Pierre did image the impact using his 3.5 meter!
Doug Summers reported on a pair of observing sessions over the past month.
One was an event for a group of home-schooled children and parents. An interesting twist was that all the telescopes were pointed at the same classes of objects, changing to different classes objects as the evening went on.
This made it consistent for the children/parents to learn about the night sky.
Craig Nance presented
The Sky This Month. The object of the month was Pluto, including a review of the ongoing debate over whether Pluto should be classified as a major planet.
Dr. Jean-Charles Cuillandre was the featured speaker of the night. Jean-Charles is an astronomer with CFHT and is primarily responsible for creating the spectacular images in the famous CFHT calendars. Jean-Charles presented an impressive overview of the growth of CCD detectors in CFHT; from the early, small detectors to Megacam.
Next, he showed how the raw images from the detector are processed into the spectacular color images. He then gave us an overview of the CFHT calendars program. He closed with a collection of photographs from this program.
Many of the pictures he showed are on the
CFHT web site. I think that everyone was impressed with Jean-Charles' accomplishments in taking and processing these images. And, we thank CFHT for making these images available to the community of astro-enthusiasts.
For
club business, Pierre kicked-off a discussion about WHAC meetings. The perception is that a relatively small number of persons are responsible for most of the prep work for meetings. This is a common situation with volunteer clubs.
The intent was to make sure that everyone knows that their contributions to the club are welcome and important. And, that the present club leaders may need to "back off" having such a rich collection of events.
In a wide-ranging general discussion the Scribe noted the following:
- Club members are happy if some of the meetings are "informal", to include potlucks and impromptu observing sessions.
- Some ideas for future "informal" meetings were discussed and included:
- Telescope show - everyone bring their telescope and set them up in the large Keck meeting room. Each person share a bit about their telescope.
- Mirror Making hands-on demonstration. The Scribe (a "sort of" trained mirror maker) can bring in mirror making equipment and give people some hands-on time working on glass. If any WHAC member is interesting in making a mirror/telescope, contact the Scribe directly. This would be an informal, one-on-one thing.
- Star Hopping and Observing - members share how they observe. This might best be done as part of the "telescope show". If each observer shared 10-minutes of how they observe, we'd have a lot of great ideas.
- History of Astronomy - one member said that they could do a presentation(s) on the history of astronomy.
- Mayan calendar - one member said that they could lead a discussion.
The next WHAC meeting will be
Tuesday October 10, 2006 at the Keck Headquarters. We will discuss the November 8 transit of Mercury across the Sun. As always, all are invited to the pre-meeting social/dinner at the Parker Ranch food court at ~6pm.
