President Bernie Zelazny called the meeting to order at 7:30 PM in 204 ACR Building on the Sul Ross State University Campus.  Jim Walker presented a program on the major astronomical events of the 1900s (see below).
        In the business meeting after the program, Secretary Jim Walker moved the acceptance of the minutes of the previous meeting as printed in the January 2000 Newsletter.  The motion carried, and there were no corrections or additions.

        Betty Lou Grimm presented the treasurer's report below:

• 1901.  First transatlantic radio message.  Guglielmo Marconi (Italy).  Radio becomes important in astronomy by the 1950s.

• 1903.  First powered airplane flight.  Wilbur and Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk.  Because we have to fly through the air before we can fly into space, mastering flight dynamics becomes essential in early steps toward space flight in the 1940s.

• 1905.  Special relativity.  Albert Einstein  sets a cosmic speed limit equal to the velocity of light, making interstellar travel distressingly time consuming.  Many other implications, such as e = mc2, and the twin paradox.

• 1911.  Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram.  Ejnar Hertzsprung (Denmark) and Henry Russell (US), working independently.  Plotting the magnitude of stars against their spectral classes leads to a classification of stars and an understanding of stellar evolution.

• 1912.  Luminosity-period relationship in Cepheid variables.  Henrietta Leavitt  (US) discovers brighter Cepheids in Small Magellanic Cloud have longer periods.  Leavitt's discovery soon leads to the use of Cepheids as standard candles in determining interstellar distance.

• 1912.  Red shift.  Vesto Slipher (US) finds red shifts in 12 galaxies, indicating motion away from the earth, laying the groundwork for the expanding universe.

• 1917.  Calibrating the Cepheids.  Harlow Shapley (US) measures distances to Cepheids in our galaxy, thereby calibrating their absolute magnitudes as standard candles in measuring interstellar distances.

• 1917.  100-inch scope.  Mt. Wilson, California.

• 1923.  Cepheids in the Andromeda Galaxy.  Using the 100-inch at Mt. Wilson, Edwin Hubble (US) finds Cepheids in the Andromeda Galaxy; distance measurements show it must be outside our own galaxy, changing the scale of the universe.

• 1926.  First flight of a liquid-fuel rocket.  Robert Goddard (US), lays the basis for space flight.

• 1929.  Expanding universe.  Edwin Hubble (US) finds more distant galaxies have the greatest red shifts, and thus the greatest velocities of recession, as in a gigantic explosion.  Fred Hoyle (England) later calls this, derisively, the Big Bang Theory.  To date, no one has a better term.

• 1930.  Pluto.  Clyde Tombaugh at Lowell Observatory discovers the last planet.  But in recent years, Pluto's planetary status has been questioned.  It may be that Pluto is merely one of many similar Kuiper Belt objects, rather than a true planet like the first eight discovered.

• 1931.  Radio waves from the Milky Way.  Karl Jansky, at Bell Labs, trying to find the source of static in telephone circuits, discovers the source is in the Milky Way.

• 1937.  Radio-mapping the Milky Way.  Grote Reber builds backyard radio telescope for $700.00, eventually maps radio sources in Milky Way, leading to the field of radio astronomy.

• 1938.  Nuclear fusion in stars.  Hans Bethe (US) and Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker (Germany) propose fusion mechanisms as the source of stellar energy.  Bethe once said in a popular lecture that the sun would become a red giant and destroy the earth in five billion years.  A man in the back of the room asked, "How long did you say?"  Bethe answered carefully, "Five . . . billion . . years."  "Oh," the man said, much relieved.  "I thought you said five million years."

• 1939.  First commercial TV broadcasts in US.  Dawn of high-quality electronic imaging, eventually revolutionizing astrophotography.

• 1940.  Radar plays pivotal role in Battle of Britain.  Later becomes useful in astronomy.

• 1943.  German V-2 rockets.  200-mile range, first vehicles to reach the edge of space.  Wernher von Braun heads program, fires more than 4,000 V-2s through early 1945, emigrates to US with many colleagues.  V-2 becomes mainstay of early American and Russian space programs.

• 1945.  Geosynchronous communication satellites. Arthur C. Clark, science fiction writer (2001, for example), first proposes such satellites.  These satellites, about 22,000 miles above the equator, take 24 hours to complete their orbits.  Each satellite therefore remains above a particular point on the earth's equator.  First launched 20 years after Clarke's proposal.

• 1948.  200-inch scope.  Palomar Mountain, California.

• 1950.  Oort Cloud.  Jan Oort (Holland) proposes distant reservoir for comets.  The Oort cloud nicely explains many aspects of cometary orbits and composition.

• 1957.  Sputnik 1 (USSR).  First artificial satellite.  Low earth orbit.

• 1959.  Explorer.  First American satellite, after several failures.

• 1959.  Luna 1 (USSR).  First spacecraft to leave earth's gravitational field.

• 1960.  Quasars (from quasistellar objects).  Allan Sandage and Thomas Matthews (US) discover these highly energetic objects, the most distant objects known.

• 1961.  Yuri Gagarin (USSR).  First man to orbit earth.

• 1962.  John Glenn (US).  First American in orbit.

• 1965.  Early Bird.  First geosynchronous communication satellite, hovered over Atlantic.

• 1967.  Radio pulsars.  Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish (England) discover radio sources pulsing with periods of a few hundredths of a second to a few seconds.  Early on, pulsars looked promising as possible signals from extraterrestrials, since the simplest kind of radio signal would be a series of pulses.  But pulsars were soon explained as rotating beams of radio energy emanating from spinning neutron stars.

• 1969.  Neil Armstrong.  Steps on the moon, and blows one of his lines.  What we heard him say was, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," which somehow doesn't make a lot of sense.  What he intended to say was, "That's one small step for a man . . ."

• 1976.  Viking 1 and 2 (US).  First Mars landings.  No convincing evidence of life.

• 1981.  First space shuttle launched.

• 1986.  Challenger disaster.  All 7 shuttle crew members die just after liftoff.  A leak in an O-ring in one of the solid rockets caused an explosion in the main liquid-fuel tank.

• 1987.  Supernova 1987A.  Brightest in 400 years; naked-eye visible in southern hemisphere.

• 1990.  Hubble Space Telescope.  NASA launched the Hubble without testing the primary mirror.  This primary was the most precisely ground mirror ever made, unfortunately ground to the wrong curvature!  Corrective lenses, rather like eyeglasses, were fitted on a special shuttle mission.  Would proper testing have cost as much as a shuttle mission?

• 1992.  400-inch scope.  Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

• 1994.  Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashes into Jupiter.  This crash of a train of 22 cometary fragments, none larger than about 1 1/2 mile across, provided a nice object lesson on the hazards of such events.  The results of the crashes, black marks in Jupiter's atmosphere, were clearly visible in small scopes.  The impact of such fragments on the earth would be devastating.

• 1995.  Planets orbiting a sun-like star.  Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (Swiss) find spectroscopic evidence of large extrasolar planets.  Earlier, planets were discovered orbiting neutron stars, but such stars would not be likely hosts for earth-like planets.  About 30 large planets have subsequently been discovered spectroscopically around sun-like stars.

• 1997.  Mars Pathfinder Missions.  After a hard, bouncy landing, as intended, we watched the Mars Sojourner drive across many yards of the Martian landscape, analyzing rocks and sending back great pictures.

• 1997.  Gamma ray bursters.  Short-lived sources of gamma rays found to lie in distant galaxies, making them the highest-energy objects known.

• 1999.  Chandra.  Orbiting X-ray observatory named in honor of Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Indian-American astrophysicist.  We can now observe across essentially the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum from very short wavelengths through ultraviolet, visible light, infrared, and radio waves.

• 1999.  Hubble Space Telescope.   Repaired again, now better than ever.  Failed gyros replaced, aging computer replaced with a mighty 486!  New images look great.

        Approximately 14 people attended the February 5th BBAS Star Party held at John and Brenda Bell's home in Limpia Crossing near Fort Davis. There were several potential members in attendance. The potluck was a success.
        There was a Questar telescope set up on the porch of the house which some attendees enjoyed using.  The observatory proper, with a roll-off-roof, is separate from the house and contains a six-inch Astrophysics refractor telescope.  Its motors are very smooth and the pointing accuracy is very good.  Several open clusters and nebula were observed with the refractor and the clarity of the images were outstanding.  There was also a 15 inch Dobsonian scope available on the observatory's attached porch, which was also used for viewing.
        Our thanks to Brenda and John Bell for their special hospitality, and to all the members and potential members who attended.

        (The New York Times).  The largest American scientific satellite, the 17-ton Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, is in danger of premature death.
        After nine years in orbit, its instruments are still producing floods of data about the most violent phenomena in the distant universe, and probably could keep going for years. But one of the spacecraft's three gyroscopes has failed. And flight controllers may have to destroy the $600 million Compton observatory before it loses another gyroscope, thus becoming a possible hazard to populated areas when, uncontrollable, it eventually dives through the atmosphere at the end of its useful life.
        So officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration must make a difficult decision later this month: if engineers cannot come up with a reliable alternative way to control the atmospheric re-entry without one or both of the remaining gyroscopes, the otherwise fully operational Compton observatory will be commanded to make a controlled suicidal plunge back to Earth in late March or April.

If we have not yet received your dues, then please use the convenient envelope addressed to our treasurer that is included with this copy of your Newsletter.

Betty Lou Grimm, Treasurer
Big Bend Astronomical Society, Inc.
1001 N 2nd Street, Apt F-22
Alpine, TX 79830