Minutes to the meeting of October 11^th, 2006

Upcoming Events:

 John Thomas and Rollin Grey will meet with Bob Jordan from the Foothills Christian Center for a sun party starting at 10:00am on ONE of the following dates: October 16^th, 18^th, 25^th, 26^th or 27^th

 Saturday, October 14^th is Customer Appreciation Day at the Valley Country Store in Vaughn. John Thomas and Rollin Grey will be doing a Sun party there with the hope of selling more raffle tickets. Anyone care to join us?

 October 20^th will be a Star Party at the Benton Lake Wildlife Preserve. There will be public attending. The staff will do the advertising for us on this event. Benton Lake is located North of Great Falls on the Bootlegger Trail road about 15 miles out. It is paved all the way to the Ranger Station. If you have any remaining raffle tickets, please bring them to this event!  

October 27^th is the monthly Lewis and Clark public star party at the Interpretive Center. This will be the last chance to sell our remaining raffle tickets.

 November 8^th is the Transit of Mercury across the Sun. We will have the raffle drawing at this special event. This will be held at Great Falls High School at a spot to be announced later.  

 John Thomas signed CMAS up for the Night Sky Network sponsored by NASA, the JPL and ASP. They provide educational kits with specific topics at no cost to the club. Our first kit is on Transits, Eclipses and Shadows. We examined the materials and looked at the DVDs contained in the kit and found it to be interesting and useful. The instruction manuals come as a PDF file on the DVD that can be printed for use with the materials. The club can get future kits with different topics at no cost. This will allow use to have a wider range of programs we can do for schools, clubs and other events.

 It’s that time of year to start looking for a Star Watch site again.   It was recommended that we go out and meet the new Ranger in Monarch and see if we can swing a better deal with then than we’ve had in the past. John will speak with the owner of the land at our Monarch site to see if we can use that site for Star Watch. The fact that the club now has insurance may be a selling point there and maybe on the Forest Service land as well.

 Jim Knutson may have an agreement with Carquest about using their 30’x50’ tent for Star Watch at no charge this season. There is still a possibility of getting the Porta-Potties donated as well.

 Treasury Report: