The 421st Meeting of the Altrincham and District Astronomical Society, held at Timperley Village Scout hut on Friday 1st December 2006 at 8pm

Those present were:
Paul Clark, Kevin Thurstan, Mark Crossley,
Tony Aremia, Don Utton, Norman Thurstan,
Colin Eaves, Geoffrey Walton, Graham Sinagola,
Nick Dixon, Ged Birbeck, Roger Livermore,
Paul Brierly, Chris Suddick, Colin Bowler,
Stephen McHugh, Mike Cook, Nick Odom,
Jordan Odam. 1 other (total 20)

The Chairman opened by welcoming everyone to the 421st meeting and told us that this evening would start with a little show & tell.
Geoff Walton gave us a demonstration of his new Vixen Skypod with a 110mm modified Maksutov optical tube. This computer controlled mount comes with a planetarium unit which contains various astronomical catalogues. He went on to describe the set up and alignment procedures which were not as intuitive as he had hoped but eventually he got it moving, taking questions during the demonstration.
Next was Paul Brierly showing his Vixen GPDX mount on a heavy Meade field tripod with a special Alt and Dec interface from Chris Heapy to help polar alignment. It has sky sensor PC and uses it to mount various scopes including 70mm Teleview ranger used with a web cam as a guide scope, Zenith Star 66mm for CCD work. He explained he had had some problems which Mike and Mark had sorted out for him before PSP3, the mount will take his SPX200 but not his 300.

Paul Clark then showed us some photographs from peak star party III and reported on the weekends events.

We then had a break.

After the break Paul Clark then spent some time on a sky diary of what we should be able to see over the next month with various pieces of equipment.

It was put to the meeting that we would not be using the room over the next two Fridays (either side of Christmas) and was stated that the next meeting would be Friday the 5th January 2007 and any offers of a talk would be considered.

The meeting was then brought to a close.