On Thursday July 2, we will have the next meeting of the San Juan Stargazers Astronomy Club. We usually invite everyone to attend because we normally want to extend exciting astronomy learning to everyone, not just to our members, but on July 2 we will have a members-only business meeting.
We will meet in the fellowship hall of the Community United Methodist Church at 434 Lewis St. at 6 p.m.
It will also be a special happy birthday pizza party for our beloved nation. Wow, we made it to 250 years — a true miracle from day one.
I have been looking at our history (since I don’t need to prepare my James Webb latest discoveries presentation) and I cannot believe how much of our history that I had forgotten. For one, I forgot how long the American Revolution lasted. 1776 was when we first said we wanted a country. It was a long time and many horribly close battles before it actually happened.
We have an agenda for the meeting that starts with looking at four volumes of club history, since 2012, that Joan Mieritz has kept over the years of newspaper articles, attendance sign-ins, take-home study hand-outs, membership lists, etc. We can look through these as we eat our pizza. Our biggest goal is to make the necessary improvements to keep our club going.
We started the San Juan Stargazers with 10 members and two leaders, Jerry Granok and Joan Mieritz, deeply committed to making a club and working together very well. Then we gained our strongest member ever, John Buting, after the club’s first year. Buting and his amazing 20-inch telescope, I think, were the high point of our club. I remember our awe-inspiring star parties with Buting and once a dozen other telescopes in the Chimney Rock upper parking lot. Oftentimes, Buting did star parties by himself in the cold at Echo Lake, Lake Capote and Molas Pass.
We had so many plans for the future of our club. To our horror, Buting died at 53 and then the pandemic happened and we have never recovered from either. We have to figure out how to make it better and keep it going.
If you want to join our club to help us, you can do it at this meeting or on our beautiful website, sanjuanstargazers.org. This will be a very important meeting.
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