Minutes of the monthly meeting of Sangamon Astronomical Society held February 16th, 2006 at 7:00 PM at Morgan Stanley.

The members of the Board of Directors are:

Larry Hardy
Mike Robertson
Ray Watt
Jim Rosenthal
Glenn Cunningham

Updates

SAS will be doing a presentation for the Boy Scouts on Tuesday February 28th from 7pm - 8:30pm at the Little Flower School 800 Stevenson Drive. We will be presenting a NASA Night Sky Network toolkit called "Our Galaxy, Our Universe".

Next months discussion topic: SAS Member Fred Pilcher will give a run down on how to successfully view all 110 Messier objects at the Messier Marathon.

Treasury Report:  Jim Rosenthal handed out the latest numbers.

Planning and Grants:  No Report.

Observing Program:  No Report.

Light Pollution Committee: No Report.

Public and Private Events: Messier Marathon will be March 24th-25th at the Jim Edgar Pather Creek State Park.

Star Party: The dates for next years star party are Sept 21st - 24th. The new PayPal system has now been fully tested and is ready to go. Final Tshirt selection is being made now which after the registration on the web site will open.

Presentation

Tonights presentation was from Nancy Atkinson who is our local NASA Ambassador. Nancy gave us and update on all the goings on at NASA from the New Horizons mission to Pluto to the new Shuttle replacement vehicle. Nancy also talked about the recently returned Star Dust mission which returned particles of a comet back to earth. She even brought with her samples of Aerogel which were used in the Star Dust mission to capture particles from the comet. SAS would like to thank Nancy for coming out and getting us all up to date.

The meeting was adjourned at 9pm.