Minutes of the monthly meeting of Sangamon Astronomical Society held December 15th, 2005 at 7:00 PM at Morgan Stanley.

The members of the Board of Directors are:

Larry Hardy
Mike Robertson
Ray Watt
Darren Hulskotter
Glenn Cunningham

Updates

SAS board election were held at this months meeting. The board for next year will be Larry Hardy, Ray Watt, Glenn Cunningham, Mike Robertson and Jim Rosenthal. Also a new budget for 2006 was motioned and seconded. In an attempt to get members to pay their dues on time, we decided to give away Orion DeepSky 600 Sky Atlases to anyone who paid their dues before Jan. 1st. We handed out serveral maps at the meeting.

Next months discussion topic: "Planetarium Software "

Treasury Report:   Darren handed out the latest numbers.

Planning and Grants:  No Report.

Observing Program:  No Report.

Light Pollution Committee: No Report.

Public and Private Events: SAS held an indoor presentation to the cub scouts on December 3rd. There were about 15 kids and 5 adults that we broke up into three groups of five. We had three rooms set up to discuss different topics. One room had a planetarium setup to teach the kids about finding stars in the night sky. Another room was setup to talk about using star charts. And in the third room we had our materials from the NASA NIght Sky Network where we talked about light pollution and how we find planets around other stars.

Star Party: The tenative dates for next years star party are Sept 21st - 24th.

Presentation

Tonights discussion topic was "Eyepieces". This was a good conversation about optics. Comments ranged from how eyepieces are constructed to which manufacturer has the best products.

The meeting was adjourned at 9pm.