President Bernie Zelazny opened the meeting at 7:30 PM in 309 Lawrence Hall, Sul Ross Campus.  There were 20 people present.  The minutes were accepted as printed in the previous Newsletter.  John Bell gave a stimulating presentation on the life and times of Johannes Kepler.

       Betty Grimm submitted the following treasurer's report:

       End of minutes.

       George Observatory Bill.  HB164 passed the Senate with 30 yeas, 0 nays, and 1 present not voting.  It was signed in the House May 23 and now goes to the Governor's office.  Barbara Wilson, Director of George Observatory, was very pleased with the many letters, emails, and phone calls to our legislators when the bill looked dead, and also pleased with the two supporting editorials in the Houston Chronicle.  No doubt Pete Gallego's support as a cosponsor in the House also helped.
       Keep in mind that HB164  is a piece of enabling legislation that allows certain counties surrounding the George Observatory to enact lighting ordinances.  Those counties will need to act before their outdoor lighting can be controlled.  The situation there is the same as ours in Brewster and other counties surrounding McDonald Observatory.  Some of the counties in our area have acted, while others - including Brewster - have not done so as yet.

       Newman Fund: Annual Contribution to McDonald Observatory.  We have just made our annual contribution of the interest earned on the Newman Fund, together with other funds, in support of the observatory's new Astronomy Education Center.  The figures below result from the procedures we have adopted to protect the Newman Fund from erosion by inflation.  Without some such procedure, our fund would progressively lose its value across time.

       Fresh from the early 17th century, our guest, Herr Kepler, (with the assistance of his colleague John Bell) explained the new astronomy with some references to the exciting work of that notable Italian, Galileo Galilei, with his magnifying optic tube.  Herr Kepler even had a few words to say about the recent witchcraft trial of his mother.  Wearing a black mustache and beard, and dressed in his seventeenth-century costume, Herr Kepler appeared remarkably well preserved for a man born in 1571.
       Kepler was born on December 27, 1571, in the German town of Weil der Stadt, in the territory of the Holy Roman Empire.  He arrived at our meeting from 1628, when he was living in Ulm.  He was still technically the Imperial Mathematician but was looking for support primarily from a new patron, the soldier of fortune, Albrecht von Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland and Zagan. 
       Trained as a minister, Kepler also taught astronomy.  He had no students in his second year of teaching, and his salary was normally in arrears.  Although a Protestant, Kepler had conflicts with the Protestant pastor in Linz, perhaps because he was living in a time of great religious conflict and other turmoil.  Kepler's worst year was 1611, when he lost his wife and favorite child, and the emperor abdicated.  Nevertheless, Kepler remained the Imperial Mathematician.
       Kepler's mother was always difficult and quarrelsome.  She was accused of witchcraft because a girl walking past her house felt a pain in her shoulder - not a trivial matter because 6 women were burned at the stake in 1615.  The mother was jailed in chains at the age of 73, and Kepler was expected to pay for her two guards.  The guards claimed she couldn't shed tears, which they took as evidence of being a witch.  She was questioned under threat of torture and released in a week, only to die in 6 months.
       Kepler devised a model of the solar system by letting a sphere represent the orbit of each planet. He began by letting a sphere of a particular size represent the orbit of Saturn, the most distant planet then known.  He then inscribed within that sphere one of the 5 perfect solids - a tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, or icosahedron - and within that solid he inscribed a sphere representing the orbit of Jupiter.  Only 6 planets were known in Kepler's time, so he placed one of the perfect solids between each of the spheres representing the adjacent planets.  By fiddling with this scheme, Kepler arrived at a model where the sizes of the spheres corresponded fairly closely with the known sizes of the planetary orbits.  He also represented the speeds of the planets in the different portions of their orbits by an ascending and descending series of musical notes, the music of the spheres.
       To develop his model further, Kepler needed better data.  Before the invention af the telescope, Tycho de Brahe, a wealthy Danish astronomer, had made the most accurate observations of the positions of the stars and planets.  When Tycho came to Prague as Imperial Mathematician, Kepler went to work for him.  Tycho gave Kepler the job of describing the orbit of Mars, which Kepler boasted he would finish in 8 days; the task in fact took 8 years, and hundreds of pages of calculations.
       When Tycho died, Kepler took his data under care.  An old idea from Copernicus held that the planets moved at constant speed in circular orbits.  But Mars moved at variable speed, faster or slower in different parts of its orbit.  With the aid of Tycho's data, Kepler arrived at the following laws:

1.  The orbit of each planet is an ellipse, with the sun at one of the foci.
2.  A line between the sun and a planet sweeps equal areas in equal intervals of time, so the planet moves faster when it is closer to the sun and slower when it is farther away.
3.  T2 = a3.  The square of a planet's orbital period (in earth years) is equal to the cube of its mean distance from the sun (in astronomical units, the distance from the earth to the sun).

1.  What are the principal parts of the universe?  The sun, fixed stars, earth and planets, corresponding to the Holy Trinity.
2.  Why is the sun the center of the universe?  The sun is the source of heat and light, and the principal source of the movement of the planets.
3.  How does the sun move the planets?  By an attractive force, like magnetism, and also a repulsive force; planets lag behind sun as it rotates.
4.  Are planets carried on moving spheres?  No, orbits are elliptical.
5.  What is the order of planets in size?  Larger planets are farther from the sun.
6.  How far away are the fixed stars?  About 4,000,000 diameters of the sun.
7.  Are stars like the sun?  No, the sun is brighter.
8.  Why doesn't the earth fly apart if it's rotating?  Earth is spherical, so it's rotation is "natural."

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