6/12 HEAD BUSINESS MEETING: SUMMARY

K.Hurley, M.Elvis

A

HEAD Executive Committee meeting was held at the Pittsburgh AAS Meeting on 12 June 1995. Those present were: M. Elvis (chair), K. Hurley (Sec/Treas), M. Ulmer, C. Kouveliotou, C. Dermer.

BY-LAWS

E-mail balloting was accepted by the AAS Council. A change to gender-neutral by-laws was also accepted. HEAD now has to conduct a vote of the members to approve the gender-neutral changes.

ROSSI PRIZE

The committee approved a vote of thanks to Gerry Fishman for presenting the Rossi Prize cash award to the Division to enhance the Rossi Prize fund.

Should HEAD invest money in a money-market account to better endow the Rossi Prize? How much are we getting now in interest?

LOBBYING

There is a perceived need to lobby congress on behalf of science, astrophysics and high energy astrophysics in particular. How can HEAD help? Lobbying is legal for the AAS and its Divisions so long as no more than 5% of the AAS budget goes toward this activity.

Some suggestions for HEAD were:

• Find the congressional districts, representatives for all HEAD members (both where they work and live). Check APS/FYI, AOL, Compuserve for voting records of representatives. Notify members who live in the districts of members of key committees of this, and of upcoming votes, issues.
• Give all HEAD members a moment to write their representatives at the start of the HEAD Divisional meetings. Supply materials.
• Pay days of per diem for extending visits to DC?
• Send a messages to HEAD members to inform them about the upcoming vote on the science budget.

SAN ANTONIO MEETING

There will be no plenary XTE talk. There are 8 plenaries, but 4 prize talks, and one policy talk. Need speakers for HEAD XTE session. Will ask the instrument PIs- Bradt, Rothschild, Holt. Swank, the Project Scientist, could open the session. A special evening session on proposing for XTE could be arranged.

The second HEAD session will be on Galactic Microquasars. We will ask Mirabel (Aql transient) or Hjellming (Nova Sco) to cover radio aspects; Zhang or Harmon from the BATSE team for X-ray perspective. A third talk could be on theory, or on optical observations. Each session is 1.5 h, each speaker 30 m or so.

A session on `Unidentified Sources' was suggested for a later Special HEAD session, e.g. at Wisoconsin in June 1996.

SAN DIEGO DIVISIONAL MEETING

March 10-14 is a big Japanese ASCA meeting. We could have the HEAD meeting around Easter break. The HEAD meeting will highlight XTE, SAX, HETE, Future missions and concepts. Workshop session on how XTE instruments are working. Could do the same type of workshop for ROSAT, ASCA. Contributed papers on XTE results. Good poster space is essential. Plenary sessions should be held for subject reviews. Announcement should not mention solar physics. Evening sessions will not be pre-scheduled, but rooms can be made available to those who want them. How should parallel sessions be organized: Extended vs. point source? Optically thin vs. thick? E.g. EGRET results. BH candidates, ns systems, SNR, WD's. Rough Schedule: June 30- 1st announcement; Abstracts due Dec 31. Prelim. program meeting at January AAS.