Hello, Members of the Denver Astronomical Society!
As your new club president, I have decided to resurrect the President’s Corner column in our monthly newsletter.
I believe that communication is the lifeblood of any organization. Without excellent communication, things fall through the cracks, people get disappointed, and messages get mixed or lost altogether. I will strive to ensure that you receive timely, informational, and appropriate information from the DAS during my term. Since we now have roughly 650 members (as opposed to about 200 when I joined in 2008), I feel that it is imperative for me to keep you abreast of what is happening within the club.
Also, I strongly believe that communication must be a two-way street. If you have questions, I want to ensure that you get answers. If you have ideas, suggestions, feedback (both positive and negative), I want you to contact me, or one of the other officers or volunteers who are involved in the issue that concerns you. If we are not responsive to your needs, we don’t belong in these positions, plain and simple.
I do have a background in a particular type of communication. I am a retired air traffic controller with over 20 years of experience in the Federal Aviation Administration. I loved the fact that pilots and controllers had to communicate in a very precise and clear manner, and this experience has served me well when it comes to organizing events or conducting meetings. If I ask you a question, it will be because I have missed something and I want to ensure that I get every detail correct.
I’ll now turn to the current issue that has overtaken all of our lives for the last 13 months: Coronavirus. This has definitely had an impact on the services and educational opportunities that we at the DAS like to offer. But through the use of Zoom, we only missed one or two general meetings, and we have opened up the collection of available speakers to people from all around the world. If you missed our most recent meeting with Isobel Romero-Shaw, who spoke to us from Australia, you need to catch it later when it’s published on our YouTube Channel.
Your executive board, under Ed Ladner, has been working diligently on a plan for limited reopening of things like our Public Nights, our Open Houses, and such. I plan to shift gears a bit and bring our volunteers more fully into this conversation and send out a survey to gauge their readiness to return to duty, and under what circumstances. Because of the seriousness of the virus, I do not want to rush this process. We want to ensure that your risk is as close to zero as possible.
One of the things I do want to continue, even after we can safely meet in person, is to have our meetings available in dual fashion: In person and online. I know that we have members who would prefer not to drive to a meeting in bad weather, and if we continue to broadcast the in-person meetings via Zoom, we can include anyone who wishes to participate in that manner.
Another thing I’m working on is restarting the member In-Reach program. We ask our members to create a presentation about some area of astronomy that can enlighten other members who may not have much experience with that particular area. In the past, we’ve had talks about Archeao-Astronomy, what to look for when buying your first telescope, and astrophotography tools and techniques, to name a few. Our In-Reach scheduler is Bill “MrBill” Stevens, and while he’s already got one candidate lined up, we need more people to bring your experience to the rest of us. If you have a topic that you can speak about and help bring others along, please contact him at oboistbill@gmail.com. Don’t be shy – we’ve all stumbled around a bit, but we are amateurs, after all (at least most of us are).
With that, I’ll turn you loose until next month. Clear Skies!
Dena McClung
President, Denver Astronomical Society