B.C.A.A.S. MEETING MINUTES

January 8, 2009

 

Attendees: 29

 

Meeting started at: 7:30pm and ended at: 9:04pm

 

Barb welcomed everyone to the New Year and congratulated Dave on his work as President last year. Barb wants us to fill out a survey on the club web site which seeks ideas on how to improve the club meetings and activities. Also, the Pegasus is on the web site and hardcopies will be mailed soon. She also noted there will be a Board meeting on the Thursday, January 22 at her house.

 

We listened to a song dedicated to the international year of astronomy titled “Shoulders of Giants”.

PBS will be airing a show titled “400 years of the telescope” at 10pm on April 10. You can also find out more on the web at http://www.400years.org/planetarium.php

 

The Night Sky Network has scheduled a webcast every month this year. The January broadcast will be on the 15th at 9:00pm on SETI. The phone number is 1-888-455-9236 and the pass code is “Night Sky Network”. There will be a corresponding PowerPoint presentation at http://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/download-view.cfm?doc id=359.

 

The Pennsylvania Outdoor Lighting Council, which Barb is a member of, is seeking candidates for this award for their “Good lighting Award”.

 

Linda gave the treasury report – also, she  is collecting dues now. We have to pay the Barnstormers a $35 annual fee to continue our use the flying field.

 

Ryan Hannahoe, a past BCAAS member now at the University of Montana gave a presentation, titled “Listening to the Universe”, on the efforts of the scientific community to detect gravity waves. Einstein’s physics predicts gravity waves so detecting them would be a further confirmation of his physics. Gravity waves should be produced by any mass in motion, even the waving of your hand, but the first attempts at detection will be limited to very large sources because our detectors will only work at this scale. Examples of large sources would include supernovae, close binary star systems and binary black holes. We have two detectors (named LIGO) in the USA located in Washington and Louisiana with another three located in other parts of the world. None are yet in full operation. There is also a space-based detector (LISA) in the planning stages that will be much more sensitive than LIGO.  In parallel, a team code-named MTGWAG is attempting to write the software needed to make sense of the complex data the detectors will collect. Ryan’s presentation included several animations that helped to explain how all this will operate.

 

Afterwards Ron brought up the new mass measurements of the milky way and Dave pointed out the Maser-based technique used to detect the additional mass was more important for other measurement. Barb reviewed new information that suggested that galactic-mass black holes may form before their host galaxies. Lane described the asteroid occultation that would occur at 6am on January 9.

 

Lane Davis, Secretary

 

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