Meeting Minutes 25 Feb 2016

Co-chairman Chris Cole hosted the meeting. 31 members and visitors attended. The evening’s presentation was “Binary Stars” by club member Jim DellaPenna. The talk was streamed live and recorded for YouTube, and it was very well received by attendees. 1. Club elections are coming up. We will need to elect 3 new Co-chairpersons and a new Secretary. Our current Treasurer (Steve Izzo) plans to run again. Please contact an officer at [email protected] if you have questions about fulfilling any of these…

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In Memoriam: Gerald F. Watson II

22 May 1937- 28 January 2016 The Raleigh Astronomy Club lost a long time member and contributor on January 28, 2016. Born and raised in Erie Pennsylvania, Jerry obtained his Bachelor of Science in meteorology at Pennsylvania State University in 1959 and continued his meteorological studies earning a Master of Science degree from The University of Chicago in 1962 and a Ph. D. from Florida State University in 1971. He joined the faculty at North Carolina State University in 1972…

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Astronomy Days 2016

The Raleigh Astronomy Club and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences hosts Astronomy Days 2016 on Saturday and Sunday, January 30-31, 2016. This years event was very successful with over 15,800 visitors coming out to learn about space and astronomy.

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Posting to RAC Social Media (Officers)

When creating a post, and officer/committee head/admin can trigger the contents of the post to be posted to some or all of the RAC Social Media sites. This includes: Facebook Twitter Google+ When using this function please note that it will only post the FIRST time the article is published. Changes after the first time will not be pushed out to Social Media. Also, it is good idea to keep social media posts very short and concise. In order to…

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Approving User Posts (Officers)

By default, posts from members need to be moderated before they will publicly appear on the site. When a user enters a post from the front end of the site, the post will automatically go into a Pending state. An email will be sent to the RAC webmaster and officer alias to identify that a user post has been submitted. It must then be manually approved. In order to approve the post, go to the admin part of the site…

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Editing Your Profile Information

You can edit your profile information at any time by going to the My Profile screen. This screen can be accessed via the MEMBERSHIP INFO->EDIT MY PROFILE menu item. A sample is below: You can edit any of the fields in your profile (e.g. email address), except for the username, which is not changeable.  Please note the following important items about your profile: It is highly recommended that you do not use your user name as the public display name.…

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January Business Meeting

  RAC met on January 29, 2016.  There were about 47 members and guests in attendence beginning at 7pm with a talk, “Unmasking Europa” by Dr. Rick Greenberg.  Many thanks Dr. Greenberg for agreeing to share his knowledge of this Jovian moon with us. After the meeting, a short business meeting was held.  Phyllis Lang reported club finances in proxy for Steve Izzo, club treasurer.  About 40% of the 2015 club members have paid dues for 2016.  Members have another…

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Unmasking Europa

RAC enjoyed a special pre-Astronomy Days presentation on Friday, January 29 by Professor Richard Greenberg entitled “Unmasking Europa: the Search for Life on Jupiter’s Ocean Moon”. Professor Greenberg is a Professor Emeritus of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona. He discussed his research and that of others in regard to the Jovian moon Europa. Dr. Greenberg’s research team derived the thin-ice model of Europa which describes an active icy crust that covers a liquid saline water ocean of about…

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Special Meeting Jan 29

Please join us for a special meeting Friday, Jan 29 at 7pm for “Unmasking Europa:  The Search for Life on Jupiter’s Ocean Moon” by Dr. Richard Greenberg. The meeting is in the 4th floor Environmental Conference Center in the Nature Research Center at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences.

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Adding RAC to your Google Calendar

CALENDAR SYNC WITH GOOGLE These quick instructions will allow you to add events from the RAC calendar to Google Calendars. Any calendar app which accepts .ics files (which is the gold standard) should work, just the steps will be different. On your computer, open Google Calendar. On the left side, find “Other calendars” and click the down arrow . Select Add by URL. Enter ‘http://raleighastro.org/events.ics’ in the field provided. Click Add calendar. The calendar will appear on the left side…

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Updating the Notification Bar (Officers)

The notification bar is used to show timely information at the top of the page for members (and optionally) the general public. In order to change this, navigate to the WPFront->Notifcation Bar menu entry. Te settings page contains all the field needed to configure the bar. The top part of the screen is displayed below: In this part of the screen, you should not make edits. Just insure that the Enabled box is checked. It is also highly recommended that…

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Managing Users (Officers)

There is not much user maintenance required on the RAC site. This post describes common tasks for officers in managing users. User List The User menu on the site dashboard allows you to view the current user listing for that site. You can access it via the Users or Users->All Users menu listing. If there are any actions needed you will see a red circle with the number indicating the outstanding number of actions needed (see above). Electronic Payment User Process…

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Creating Users Manually (Officers)

Officers and Admins can create a user account manually, as opposed to requiring a user to go through the registration process. In order to create a user manually, go to the Users->Add New menu entry: Once you click this, you will see the new user screen:   At a minimum the following fields need to be set. Username – must be unique on the site Email Role – See the Managing Users help post for more information on roles Optionally, you can set…

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Creating/Editing Events (Officers)

Events (calendar entries) are created separately than pages and posts. In order to mange the events, select the Events menu on the site dashboard. The default action is to list the current future events list. Editing an Existing Event In order to make changes to an event, click the event on the list to get the event editing screen. alternative, you can create a new event by clicking Add New. On this screen, you can change the event particulars: Title…

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Creating/Editing Pages and Posts

All member can create posts for the front page/site through the backend dashboard. In addition, officers and committee members can create and edit pages and other people’s posts.   Any post not created by an officer or committee member must be approved by an officer or administrator before it is made public.  Officers are notified via email when a member post is submitted for approval. For editing pages, the process is similar for posts, so the post process is shown below.…

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