2001 UIAS Activities

This page is a brief listing of some of the activites the club has undertaken recently, listed in reverse chronological order.

Date	Activity
December 7	Observatory open house and 2nd session of telescope training. Since the weather wasn't all that great the open house was skipped, but we did manage to scrounge together the parts and materials necessary to fix up all of the setting circle lights on the telescope.
November 30	Occultation of Saturn by the Moon
November 29	Observatory training, Session 1.
November 26	Club meeting. We had a talk about 3 potential Engineering Open House projects that the club can pursue, by club member Chris Orban.
November 17, 18	Leonid Meteor Shower. We held a dark site trip, and had about 30 people come out between midnight and 5am to see the Leonids this year. The weather left something to be desired, but we got to see a lot despite the intermittent clouds and haze.
November 2	Observatory Open House. We had a large group of people join us for the open house. We setup small refractors and the red Dob out on the lawn near the observatory and a person running the 12" upstairs. All told, we had lines of people waiting to see Jupiter, Saturn, and various faint fuzzies for most of the evening, probably about 80 to 100 people over the course of the night.
October 22	Club meeting. Summary of camping trip, planning for upcoming workshops, dark site trips, observing sessiosn, and camping this semester and early next semester.
October 20, 21	Camping trip to Walnut Point State Park. Eleven club members spent the the weekend at Walnut Point State Park, all but one had never been there before. We had a good time observing, seeing Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and a veritable laundry list of DSOs through several telescopes and binoculars. Together, we brought two 80mm refractors, two 10" dobs, an 8" SCT /w Goto, a 90mm Mak/Cass /w Goto, and a number of binoculars. The night started very clear right after sunset. We put in a good two hours of observing immediately after dinner with excellent skies. After that the sky began to haze up over the next hour or so, remaining very hazy for another 30 minutes, followed by another hour of very clear views, and then alternately clouding up and clearning until we called it a night at about 3:30am. One highlight of the evening was the possible sighting of an aurora, though it has not been confirmed yet. The following day we did some hiking on the nature trails, and then visited the site of the old UI observatory, which was kept brief due to the unbelievable number of lady bugs flying around there!
October 12	Observatory open house, rescheduled after cloudy nights.
October 10, 11	Observatory training, first sessions.
October 8	Club meeting. We gave a quick summary of the fun things people did and saw at Astrofest 2001, made plans for the camping trip, had sign ups for observatory training, and mentioned tentative dates for having John Dobson come and visit this spring.
September 25	Professor Jim Kaler gave his annual talk about generally interesting astronomical subjects.
September 17	Robert O'Dell gave a talk on star formation, and the Orion nebula.
September 13, 14, 15, 16	Astrofest 2001, several members of the club went to Astrofest for the first time. While there, we were fortunate enough to have observed an aurora!
September 10	First club meeting of the semester, 8pm Astronomy building room 134, brief intro to the club, members, activies and all sorts of fun stuff, ending with an observatory tour and observing. Several of us stayed out until after midnight looking at M13, M15, M31, M57, and Uranus.
September 9	Officers' meeting: arrangements for Prof. Kaler's lecture, pre-meeting preparations and info updates on the web.
September 7	Observatory open house, 9pm to Midnight. We had views of M57, M13, M31, the Moon, Albireo, Epsilon Lyrae, and many other objects. We also had two extra scopes setup in the yard area, a 90mm refractor, and an 8" Goto SCT.
August 28	Officers' meeting: arrangements for Prof. Kaler's lecture, pre-planning semester activities, pre-Astrofest telescope maintenance planning, T-Shirt and budget stuff. Also brought over more donated metal tubing, stuff to use for dew shields, and other fun stuff.
August 21	Several club officers and club members helped run a desk for Quad Day, attracting interested parties to the club, advertising our open houses, and gave solar observing sessions at the observatory when the clouds let the Sun shine through.
August 8	Mike Lockwood and John Stone did a survey of club's telescopes, made lists of required parts, and some rough plans for getting things into shape for Astrofest and for general dark site trips year-round.
August 3	Observatory Open House, 9pm to midnight.
July 14	Club members Ameya Deoras, Doug Peltz, and John Stone took another trip out to the dark site, for some casual visual observing for a few hours. It was a very good night until clouds rolled in a little past midnight and cut the evening a little shorter than we would have liked. We met up with 5 or 6 people from the CUAS club at their site.
July 13	Observatory open house, Mars, Moon, and southern sky observing with the Ring Nebula (M57) 9pm-12am. Jim Pulokas ran the open house at the observatory while Ameya Deoras, Doug Peltz, and John Stone made a trip out to the dark site with several telescopes and binoculars for a 7 hour night of observing and astrophotography until sunrise on Saturday morning. We saw five planets, a comet, and innumerable deep sky objects, met with members of the CUAS club at their site, and had a generally wonderful time!
July 6	Observatory open house, Mars, Moon, and southern sky observing with the Ring Nebula (M57) and the Blinking-Eye Nebula (NGC 6826), 9pm-12am.
June 30	Doug Peltz and Ameya Deoras went out to the dark site to try and get a peek at Comet C/2001 A2 (LINEAR). They were ecstatic upon their return from the observing session.
June 29	Observatory open house, Mars and Moon observing, 9pm-11pm.
June 23	Several of us went out and did observing at the CUAS observatory near the UIAS dark site, after which we went back to the UIAS dark site and dusted off the club's equatorial newtonian and took it for a spin.
June 22	Summer Solstice Celebration Open house, Solar Observing 4pm-6pm, Mars observing 9pm on.
June 18	Several club members drove out to the dark site, and did binocular observing of Messier objects, 8 satellites, and Meteors.
June 15	Observatory open house, Mars observing, M13 and many other clusters. Mars madness continues!
June 14	Observatory open house, Mars observing. Mars madness continues!
June 12	Observatory open house, Mars observing. Mars madness continues!
June 11	Observatory open house, Mars observing. Mars madness continues!
June 10	Observatory open house, Mars observing. Mars madness continues!
June 8	Observatory open house
May 11	Observatory open house, some clouds fighting with us
May 4	Observatory open house
April 23	Club meeting, 8pm.
April 12	Observatory viewing of Comet C/2001 A2 (LINEAR), 8:30pm-9pm. Dark site trip, 9pm.
April 6	Observatory open house, was cloudy however.
March 26	Club meeting, 8pm. Mark Haun gave a talk about his Aurora detector project.
March 8	Observatory under repair until further notice
March 6, 7	Stuart Levy demonstrated the NCSA CAVE virtual environment.
March 5	Club meeting, observatory, 8pm.
March 2, 3	Observatory open house, double-header. Jupiter, Saturn, Moon observing
February 18	Club meeting, observatory, 8pm.
February 14	Observatory dome computer network is operational again.
February 8	CUAS club hosted an astrophotography workshop, using disposable cameras.
February 5	Club meeting, astronomy building, 8pm. Professor Mohr gave a lecture on observational cosmology.
February 2	Observatory open house, was cloudy however.
January 22	Club meeting, observatory, 8pm.
January 5	Observatory open house, 7pm on.

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This document was last modified on Tuesday, 11-Dec-2001 23:22:18 CST