Meeting Report

By Ali Khan

I was busy grinding when Umair called and reminded about meeting. Asked which topic would I speak on. I suggested “atm” but as it had already been used, I selected “scale of the universe”.

I wouldnt have to prepare anything. It was all there and more. Perfect I thought. Continued grinding.

 Around 4 I set off towards Omer’s office. Buses were on strike and so took mini vans. Reached Thokkar. On the way I found that Maroof would come and Irfan and M. Ali were somewhat agreed to come also. Meeting place was changed from Omer’s office to his home. Kept everyone informed about the meeting. Forgot to inform Ahsan Khursheed. Regretted later. Got off at Jinnah Hospital and walked towards the place. Hassaan also had plans to come. It was getting dark as I was nearing Omer’s home. Then saw him coming in his car and hopped in. He was going to bakery to collect some stuff.
Back home Umair was wating in his car. He had brought his Multimedia projector and Laptop. We set about assembling it. Took off a large map of mars from the wall after studying it a little. Downloaded the presentation from the net. Got it on wall in no time.Irfan joined us. Soon came Maroof and M. Ali, the new member and Bank Manager.The presentation went very well. During it, we had various items to eat and tea, followed with ice cream which was the climax.
Umair, Maroof and others had useful information to add at each step. This livened up the meeting. Learned about rapid inflation after big bang and dark energy and its gravitational effect in accelerating the expansion. Maroof pointed out a few numerical errors in the time scale part of the presentation. At the end Umair started Starry Night and showed present constellations and Mars. There was a beautiful star cluster on Orion’s left (East) and in level with Betelgeux and the other shoulder star. There was talk that Betelgeux was from Arabic “Ib Tul Joza” or armpit of Joza.Umair pushed me to use my 20×100 binos more often. As it was cloudy season again, Umair said that he would invite us for Mars once it clears up. Mars would only shrink by one second by then, to 13 from 14 arc seconds. There was talk of location selection for Messier Marathon in March. Hassaan called in and said that next meeting would be at his place in Cantt. Umair decided to prepare a presentation for next meeting.

All of us enjoyed and Maroof said that even if we dont do any observation under a cloudless sky, we should have such meetings to increase our knowledge.