Cheryl Breuning, Mike Heliba & Carl Breuning in the Clubhouse at the Memorial Meeting.
Cheryl, Mike & Carl in the Clubhouse
Annual Memorial Meeting Held
[2012-May-19]
As has become tradition in the last few years, a spring meeting of the club has been designated a Memorial Meeting, and the Wilders and the Breunings organized
a special dinner to remember those STMers and families and friends who have departed this Earth. This takes a lot of planning and work, and the club is
greateful to Cherie, Ray, Carl and Cheryl for making this happen. Special thanks to the Tabors who also worked hard to make this happen, and to all the members
that pitched in to help.
The Stellafane booth at NEAF 2012. Left to Right: Josh Reynolds, Dave Tabor, Dave Kelly, Phil Rounseville,
Rick Hunter, Cecilia Page, Al Monkowski, Bob Lambert, Bill Cloutier.
The Stellafane Booth at NEAF 2012
Stellafane at NEAF
[2012-May-02] It was another active weekend in the Stellafane booth
at the
North East Astronomy Forum this year (April
28-29). We had a large number of
attendees spending time on the bench learning the art of
mirror making and the basics of telescope making.
Many also asked questions and discussed how excited they
were about the upcoming
Stellafane convention. A
significant number of attendees also stopped by with
stories of making their own mirrors, and the joy of that
‘first light’ they had with it.
On the first
day, one particular grinder caught the contagious
telescope making ‘bug’, and 12 year old Abigail Gibbons
spent nearly 6 hours on Saturday making the grit sing,
and almost single-handedly brought the 6” mirror to f/8
by 4:30 pm. She has already mastered the 1/3
center over center stroke, sagitta testing and the
sharpie test. The STM’s in attendance made a quick
and easy decision to give the 6” mirror kit to Abigail,
which drew a proud smile from Abigail that could be seen
easily from across the convention hall. Her father
has agreed to help her visit their local ATM group so
she can finish the optic and get it into a scope.
She has her heart set on going a bit further, and making
it an f/6.
Abigail Gibbonds grinds a 6-inch mirror (center) while show attendees watch. Seated in the booth, secretary Carl Malikowski, president Gary Cislak, Wayne Zuhl and mirror class leader Ray Morits.
Abigail Gibbons grinds a 6-inch mirror
On the second day, it was a
steady flow of interested attendees, with many good
questions, trying their hand on a second mirror kit, but
not quite achieving the same depth by the end of the
day.
We estimated that approximately
1,000-1,200 attendees visited the Stellafane booth through
the weekend, based on the flyers that were dispensed.
Along with them, we had a few past and present
Stellafane mirror class attendees and several STM
members, who all stopped by to say hello, too.
Many thanks go out to Carl Malikowski, Ray Morits, Julie
Tabor, Rick Hunter, Al Monkowski, Wayne Zuhl and Dave
Tabor for the hours they spent spreading the telescope
making spirit in our booth this year.
Web Site Updates in response to Convention Survey
[2012-Feb-03, updated on 2012-Feb-24]
Yes, we really do read and study
the surveys we periodically pass out at convention (Thanks,
Kris Larsen!). Your webmaster has been studying the sections
related to the web, and I have made a few changes based on
the feedback, with more to come.
One request was to
have a street address for Stellafane that could be input to
a GPS or Google Maps. That is now on our
Directions page and
Maps. Another request was to make hyperlinks
more obvious to those that are color blind, and we have just
changed our link style to include non-color artifacts to
identify them.
Several respondents indicated there was
too much clutter on the home page, and navigation was
difficult. We have redesigned the home page to be less
cluttered, and key items like convention will get more space
and direct links to convention information as they are
published. Our new menu bar allows us to put more direct
links on the home page without taking up more space, and a
search box in every page's footer allows you to search for
the information you are looking for more easily.
Currently, selected pages also have a
translate page feature in their footer powered by Google, as
we have quite a few international visitors. We will be
rolling this out to every page on the site over the next
year (unfortunately, technical issues require us make a
manual edit to every page on the site to make this work,
unlike the search feature, which could be added to a single
file and appear on every page - bad planning on our part,
not to be able to do this automatically, but we will be able
to do this in the future after our page edits).
There were a lot of convection specific
requests, which will be addressed when we create the 2012
convention pages in a few months. I was glad to see the
positive feedback on the new Stellafane East map (Thanks,
Mike Patterson). I'm working on figuring out how to send out
registration confirmations, which was a popular request (I
guess folks are nervous, but I'm not aware we have ever lost
a registration, and I do follow up with all problems
encountered, which are not many).
Of course, its a bit hard to reconcile
or act on "Awesome Website" followed by "Confusing. Too many
convention pages". I know it is far from perfect, but I do
appreciate the comment "Get's Better Every Year" - that is
what I try to do.
I remind everyone we write the web site
to current web standards, and do not put a lot of effort into
testing compatibility with old browsers (although we do
nothing to try to break them, either). If you are using
current versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome or
Safari, you should have a good experience here. Internet
Explorer continues to lag in implementing many current
standards and the web site looks the worst on it, although
it is still fully functional. And if you are still on XP,
you have an old version of IE that is really not so good.
Consider using one of the other browsers that keep up with
evolving technology better. I do look at the web site on my
Android tablet, and other members check on iOS mobile
devices - overall our site is surprisingly useable on these
small screen devices, even though we don't specifically
optimize for this screen size.
Thanks for the feedback, it is
appreciated, and we do try to use it to make this site
better. I hope you find the recent changes and improvement..Webmaster Ken
