The meeting was called to order at 7:30 PM by President Bill Baker. There were 18 people present. The minutes of the November meeting were accepted as printed in the previous Newsletter.
        Betty Grimm presented the treasurer's report below.  Jim Walker presented a program on the
recent transit of an extrasolar planet. Respectfully submitted, Jim Walker, Secretary

        A team led by Greg Henry (Tenn. State) and Geoff Marcy (UC Berkeley) recently announced the transit of a planet crossing a distant star. Little known HD 209458, a Sun-like star 150 light-years away, was thought to harbor planets because of its cyclical motion toward and away from the earth. Henry and colleagues now find that this motion exactly corresponds to a planet crossing the face of the star, creating the slight dimming effect of a partial eclipse. The astronomers were then able to make a ground breaking estimate of the mass and radius of the extra-solar planet, which they find to have about two-thirds the mass of Jupiter but a radius about 60 percent larger.
         "This is the first independent confirmation of a planet [previously] discovered through changes in a star's radial velocity and demonstrates that our indirect evidence for planets really is due to planets," said Geoff Marcy. Marcy and his colleagues first detected the motion of HD 209458 on Nov. 5, 1999. Marcy and Butler reported the first evidence of an extrasolar planet orbiting a distant star in 1995. More than twenty such planets have been discovered so far.
        As with all new planets they detect, the team immediately brought it to the attention of collaborator Greg Henry, an astronomer at the Tennessee State University Center of Excellence in Information Systems in Nashville. He conducts research with several automatic telescopes at Fairborn Observatory in the Patagonia Mountains of southern Arizona.
        Henry turned one of his automatic telescopes on the star at the time Marcy and Butler predicted the planet would cross the face of the star if the planet's orbital plane were lucky enough to carry it between Earth and the star. Until now, none of the 18 other extrasolar planets Marcy and Butler have discovered has had its orbital plane oriented edge-on to Earth so that the planet could be seen to transit the star, nor have any of the other planets discovered by other researchers.
However, on Nov. 7, Henry observed a 1.7% dip in the star's brightness. Because the planet orbits its star once every 3.523 days, these observations have been repeated.
        This is an exciting development that nicely confirms the earlier discovery of the extrasolar planet.But please keep in mind that this transit is an inference from a dip in a measured light curve, not the direct observation of the planet’s shadow in front of the star in the way we directly observed our transit of Mercury. As yet, no one has directly observed the image of an extrasolar planet,  and I will make the rash prediction that no one is likely to in our lifetime. The image of any distant star is too small, and the image of an extrasolar planet smaller yet.

        Jack Mollard has two scopes for sale: a Parks 8" Newtonian on a very sturdy German equatorial mount, and a Celestron C90 on a photographic tripod.  Call Jack at 364-2453.