2005 Annual Meeting

The Centre's observatory, the Fred Lossing Observatory (FLO) near Almonte, continued to operate through the past year. It provides members with free access to a reasonably dark site to set up their own observing equipment. Qualified members also have access to the heated club house with assorted astronomical reference material, and use of the 16 inch Newtonian telescope with equatorial drive housed in a permanent observatory, and a portable 10 inch Newtonian telescope on a Dobsonian mount. Access to the equipment requires an additional fee of $35 per year, This year there were 30 members, so-called "key holders", who subscribed for the additional usage fee. Many other members used the site with their own equipment.

For the most part, things continued to operate normally with the usual basic maintenance; contracted snow clearance of the access road two times during the winter, and grass and weed cutting on the parking lot and around the observatory, and weed whacking and tree pruning along the access road in the summer. There were in addition, a few other more noteworthy items.

As noted previously, in August 2004 the observatory was broken into and the box of eyepieces and the fire extinguisher were stolen. After replacing the eyepieces in October 2004 with funding from the accumulated proceeds of the "after meeting refreshments" supplied by Art and Ann Fraser, the missing eyepiece box and contents turned up in December. It appears to have been forced open and tossed under some bushes not too far from the observatory, and remained hidden until the leaves came off the trees. The contents were all complete except that they were wet and very dirty after four months of exposure to the weather. A careful cleaning seems to have restored everything to a useable state. With the extra telescopes that we now have, the additional eyepieces can be put to good use.

A major cleanup of surplus and deteriorating equipment on the site was completed this fall. A member picked up a surplus 7 foot dome in "as-is" condition for refurbishing and/or parts. The remaining 8 foot dome, storage shed and two radio telescope antennas were dismantled and stacked by the parking lot with the help of some members. Subsequently the salvageable scrap metal was removed to a scrap yard, and the remaining trash went to the Mississippi Mills land fill site.

Around the same time, the broken gate post at our entrance was replaced with a section of heavy wall pipe salvaged from the radio telescope scrap.

Most recently, after many years of reliable service, the RA drive on the 16 telescope became erratic with the start of colder weather. It was stripped down, cleaned of many years of dirt and dried out lubricant, carefully reassembled, lubricated and re-aligned, and now seems to be running well. Hopefully there are many more years of service left in this unit.

We continue to hold the C-14 telescope, that was donated some years ago, in storage along with a more recently donated Coulter 13 inch Newtonian telescope. A continuing long term goal is to build further observatory buildings on site so the C-14, 10-inch Newtonian and the 13 inch Coulter can be permanently housed in a fashion that makes them readily usable by qualified members. To that end, we now have an option on a used 10 foot fibreglass Home Dome. It is hoped that we can take some concrete action on expanding the FLO facilities in the near future.

This page last modified: November 24, 2006