Hello to all our friends at A.O.A.S. Thanks to Bob and
everyone from A.O.A.S. who came up for the Mount Magazine
grand re-opening this past weekend. Your presence was a
big boost to the event and it was great to meet some new
faces. We had a great time visiting with your club members
and look forward to more multi-club events with your club
in the future. Thanks again everyone, and we'll see you all
soon!

Bsst Regards,
Wade Van Arsdale
(Member-Central Arkansas Astronomical Society)
http://www.caasastro.org

Hi, Wade.

Thanks to all you folks from CAAS as well as from RRAC, the Tulsa and OKC people as well. Getting together and doing something like this will go a long way towards helping the Mt Mag people realize that amateur astronomy is a worthwhile pursuit to plan for in the future. Since they ARE interested in making upgrades and improvements to accomodate a dark-sky friendly site, our combined presence down there was very helpful. We must keep at it, however, and plan something else down there for this fall if not sometime even before then.

It would be good for amateur astronomy for all AR clubs to work together and to promote our hobby in a concerted way. We all want basically the same thing, which is for amateur astronomy to be practiced by more and more people. Our Education and Public Outreach efforts will be more successful when we all work together. We all have our members who prefer to primarily practice our hobby on our own, but we also all have many folks who feel that sharing our hobby is something we want to do with everyone we meet. That is where our hobby is different from almost any other amateur pursuit...the fact that amateur astronomers actually work with and help to provide useable data to the professional astronomical community. It is absolutely true that we are the conduit between the professionals and the public at large, and that's an important aspect of amateur astronomy as well.

Let's keep working at this idea. Let's keep planning for multi-club functions and get togethers. There's so much room to expand upon this beginning and I hope this someday turns into something that every amateur astronomer in AR can look back upon and feel proud about having been a part of. Sharing our hobby amongst ourselves is to me as important as sharing it with the public.


Thanks again, Wade. And I look forward to seeing more of the CAAS members, the RRAC members, and even ole poppafred again once-in-a-while. (just kidding, Fred!)

Thank you to all the clubs that came and helped out and made the day a success. I'm looking forward in the future to holding another evening together. I would like to see us put together a star party on the scale of Okie-Tex, it's possible if we all work together.

I think having something in the fall would be a good idea, I don't think that mountain was 10 degrees cooler than the valley. Look for a story that's coming pretty soon.