June 16, 2021 Meeting Minutes

View meeting presentations – Monthly Sky Report (Albert Schulz) and “Focus: What’s the Point?” (Greg Marshall)

At 7 PM MDT on June 16, 2021, eight members of the Santa Fe Stargazers met for the Club’s regular monthly meeting. Albert Schulz presented the Monthly Sky Report, which covered events that took place since the last meeting and upcoming anniversaries, astronomical events, and news.

The evenings featured presentation – “Focus: What’s the Point?” – was given by Greg Marshall. His presentation was followed by a lively discussion on equipment and technique.

Following Greg’s presentation the group turned to the business portion of the meeting. The main discussion focused on “rebooting” in-person club activities. Several different categories of in-person events were discussed:

  • In-person club meetings at the Vista Grande Public Library;
  • Club member only observing events;
  • Support of National Park Service outreach activities (e.g., at Pecos or Fort Union); and
  • Sponsorship of our own outreach activities.

Members in attendance voiced support for restarting in-person meetings at the VGPL. Meetings like these would be “hybrid”: i.e., the in-person meetings would also be available via Zoom. The VGPL is upgrading its IT facilities to support hybrid meetings directly. While the IT upgrade is unlikely to be complete before September it may be that the bandwidth exists to support such meetings, using a laptop, now.

Members in attendance also voiced support for restarting club member only observing events. We are right now entering the summer monsoon season. We will investigate a September restart of these observing get-togethers.

There was less certainty about supporting NPS outreach activities. The consensus was that the club shouldn’t make this kind of support a formal, organized thing (i.e., where peer pressure, intentional or not, might push people to do things they are not comfortable with), but that individual members who are comfortable might do so and would be welcome to “wave the flag.”

There was even less certainty about club-sponsored or initiated activities. While there was a general consensus that we’d want to require vaccination of public participants, some were uncomfortable with the idea of asking and no one was prepared with an answer of how we could effectively or safely enforce such a requirement.

Sam will investigate re-starting hybrid (in-person and zoom) meetings at the VGPL and work with other club members on restarting club-member only observing activities.

Jim Baker will give next month’s presentation on Astro-travel.

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