HEAD Executive Committee Meeting, June 1998
The executive committee meeting of the High Energy Astrophysics Division was held on
June 8, 1998, at the San Diego AAS meeting. Present were Gordon Garmire (chair), Alice
Harding, Alan Marscher, Nicholas White, Richard Lingenfelter, Lynn Cominsky, and Alan
Guth.
Topics for the two HEAD sessions at the January 1999 AAS meeting were discussed.
Selected were: "Gravitational Radiation" and "Exotic Neutron Stars."
It was decided to pay the registration fee for invited speakers using HEAD funds.
A proposal to establish prizes for best popular high-energy astrophysics article and/or
web page was discussed. The web page idea was not favored. If a prize were established for
an article, it would need to have been published in a popular magazine. Advertising of the
prize would then need to be such that the existence of the prize would be known to
non-astronomers. Lynn Cominsky will explore this possibility with the professional science
writing community.
The April 1999 HEAD divisional meeting in Charleston was discussed. It was decided that
an hour should be reserved for a presentation of AXAF "first science," or at
least news on AXAF if the launch is too late for scientific results to have been realized.
There was some discussion of the possibility of merging the HEAD divisional and APS
astrophysics divisional meetings starting in 2000, since the membership of the latter
overlaps significantly with that of HEAD. Consideration of this was left to furture
discussion. Gordon Garmire will distribute by e-mail a list of topics and invited speakers
over the past 2-3 years to facilitate selection of topics and speakers for the April 1999
meeting.
Alan Marscher reported that there is a balance of about $30K in HEAD accounts. The HEAD
membership is somewhat over 600. The previously reported figure of over 700 was in error,
since the membership list had not yet been compared with the AAS master list of dues
payers. There were many contributions to the May 1998 HEAD Newsletter.
The next executive committee meeting will be at the Austin AAS meeting in January 1999.
The meeting was adjourned.
