June Meeting & Potluck Dinner

From Astronomy to Astrophysics: Understanding Light

As First Vice President of Skyscrapers, I have accepted the responsibility to provide speakers for our monthly meetings, and to come up with some other activities as well.

Saturday Summer Meetings & Potluck Dinners

Our summer meetings this year will be held on Saturdays, and as mentioned in the President’s Note, our meeting format will be different as well. Our goal is to provide more opportunities for our membership to participate in Skyscrapers, as we explore a number of activities we hope everyone will enjoy.

For many years now, our July meetings have been held on Saturdays, and included a cookout in the late afternoon. These meetings have always been well attended, and the casual atmosphere allows more time to socialize, exchange ideas and learn from one another. In fact, because we feel that the July meetings ran so well, a number of us wondered, “why not try this out for all of our summer meetings?”

With that in mind, Skyscrapers will hold its first summer meeting on Saturday, June 9^th, and we hope many of you will attend.

In an effort to keep things casual and relaxed, each of our summer meetings, including June , will begin with a “pot-luck” style dinner at 5:30pm. Kathy Siok is coordinating these dinners, and details concerning this can be found in her note in this issue of the Skyscraper.

From Astronomy to Astrophysics: Understanding light

Our guest speaker this month is one of our very own members, Prof. Savvas Koushiappas of the Physics Department of Brown University. He will be speaking on the topic of spectroscopy, and his talk in entitled: “From Astronomy to Astrophysics: Understanding light.” His talk will begin at 7:30pm.

After the main talk, we will take a short refreshment break before reconvening to enjoy some short presentations from our membership. Gerry Dyck will be showing us some images of a recent trip he took to observe the annular solar eclipse from the desert southwest. We also welcome others interested in sharing any images they may take of the upcoming Transit of Venus.

Spectroscopy Demonstration

Once the skies darken, weather permitting, Prof. Ian Dell’ Antonio and I will be demonstrating a Sbig spectrograph on Skyscrapers’ 16” telescope, examining stellar spectra from different classes of stars. This will be a nice compliment to Prof. Koushiappas’ talk.

Saturday Night Open House at Seagrave Observatory

Lastly, I want to encourage all members to come out to Seagrave Observatory, both for our monthly meetings and our regular Saturday open house nights. Whether you plan to observe through any of our fine telescopes, or set up your own telescope to observe with the rest of us, Saturdays at Seagrave Observatory provides a great opportunity to enjoy our hobby with one another and to learn something new about the heavens.

I hope to see you soon.

Bob Horton
1^st V.P.