President’s Message
December 2015

I want to say that serving the OCA as President for 2015 has been an honor and a privilege. I want to thank the members for their vote of confidence and must thank all the volunteers that do so much for the club. I also must thank the other officers of the club and the Board Members who generously give their time and energy to see that the Orange County Astronomers continues to be the great club it is.
Thank you to all the guest speakers that make our General Meetings at Chapman University so enjoyable and to our “What’s Up” presenters too. Thank you too Chapman University for allowing the OCA to meet in the spacious Irvine Lecture Hall. And a big thank you to all the members who make this club a wonderful place to enjoy astronomy.
A special thanks goes out to Darshan Meda who has taken over running the busy OCA Outreach Program and to Sandy & Scott Graham who took over running the Loaner Scope Program. Thanks also to Steve Condrey for tirelessly seeing that the OCA newsletter is published each month and to Dave Kodama for posting it to the website.
I also want to thank Karen Schnabel for handling the OCA Library and to Tom Kucharski for creating the monthly pre-meeting slides that run at the General meetings. Thank you Tim Hogle for being our WAA Representative and for counting election ballots. Also thank you Bob Nanz for running the Palomar Explore-the-Stars campground events.
We need to also thank Doug Acrea for taking care of the Anza House and Don Lynn for Anza site maintenance. Barbara Toy continues to run the club observatory at Anza and Charlie sees that the pads, observatories and memberships are tracked and controlled. We thank Michele Dadighat for arranging Mt. Wilson observatory trips.
Let’s not forget David Pearson teaching the monthly Beginner’s classes and to Karen & Ed Johnston for helping out at those meetings. And thanks to Bob Sharshan for running the Astrophysics meetings and to Alan Smallbone for running the AstroImagers meetings.
My hope is that more members will step up in 2016 to make “What’s Up” presentations and volunteer to help out at public outreaches. We also need members to write more articles for the OCA newsletter on any astronomy related topic.
If you have any questions or suggestions to make the club better, please contact me. The club has grown to over 800 members and I hope we grow even bigger in 2016. So lets have a very prosperous New Year.

Thanks,
Steve Short