Luncheon June 11, 2015

A very full and scintillating meeting for the 18 members and 7 guests. Pres. Judy asked Jeff to introduce our much anticipated guest speaker, Jack Newton. Jack is an accomplished and decorated astronomy expert living with his wife Alice on Anarchist. Their house is a B&B as well as housing one of his telescopes, the others being in Arizona which are remotely operated. Jack talked about the astronomical world with passion, humour and amazing knowledge. He was recognized by his peers by having an asteroid named after him...the JackAlice asteroid. He shared some of his photographs including the Northern Lights, the sun's surface and various lightning shots (some members were fascinated to learn that 50% of lighting is initiated from the ground and shoot up to the sky so if you are golfing and feel electricity in the air...lie down!). Jack talked about outer space and used numbers for size and distance that boggled our minds. For example, our sun burns 600 million tons of hydrogen every second. Another was that one tiny empty space in our sky was recently examined and with new technology revealed over 2000 entire galaxies could be seen through it. Telescopes today are looking at stars that are 100 to 300 million light years away and there are over 100 billion galaxies out there, including many that have habitable environments. Fascinating talk...we need to have Jack back before too many moons pass!

Guests were introduced and included Barbara Propp (extraodinary bacon server at Saturday's pancake event), Richard from the Times, Lenore Lawrence, and 6 Rotarians from the Penticton Okanagan Club. They were here to promote their Ribfest taking place in Okanagan Park July 3-5. They were inviting us as visitors and/or as volunteers so check out www.pentictonribfest.com if you can attend or participate.

There was a quick review of the Cactus Jalopy event last Saturday in which we served our pancake breakfast to 140 guests and manned a beer garden afterwards. Early numbers indicate we will exceed $3000 for the day to be used for our projects. Vaughn applauded the strong member turnout that made it successful.

Next was an update on the 2015 Golf Tournament coming up this Saturday and what a positive report it was. Doug, Jeff and Brian and their committees have done an extraordinary job as it is completely sold out with 86 golfers and 36 more attending the dinner and auction. Lots of volunteers are signed up so it should be a huge success and as Brian pointed out, he has over $12,000 in silent and live auction items donated already! Lots of work to get this far- well done!

Finally a boisterous happy buck session from which we learned that one year ago today, Gordon attended his first meeting and then Vaughn scored the 50/50 with $50...we haven't heard where that is going as yet.

A great 3rd to last meeting for President Judy's year!