To everyone who has an interest in occultations:

The 2016 plenary meeting of IOTA will be held in Stillwater, 
Oklahoma, on July 29, 30, and 31. All are welcome to attend. There is 
no admission fee. There will be a realtime broadcast of the talks 
onto the Web for those who cannot attend. The meeting room is Room 
110, on the first floor of the Physical Sciences II building of 
Oklahoma State University. Please plan to attend. You will want to 
arrive on the 28th, to witness a spectacular graze.

The occultation opportunity associated with the meeting is a 
naked-eye, dark-limb graze of the brightest star that the Moon can 
occult: Aldebaran, magnitude 0.85. It occurs at about 5 AM on the 
morning of July 29th, before the meeting starts, and so we'll delay 
the start of the meeting till 1:00 PM.

The IOTA Web page for the meeting is 
http://occultations.org/community/meetingsconferences/na/2016-annual-meeting/
The page will be updated periodically as details of the speakers' 
schedule become available. A campus map is available on the meeting page, 
and parking information will be available soon.

Please consider giving a talk on some project or work on occultations 
with which you have familiarity. Acceptible talks might be on any of 
the following:
* Interesting occultation observations.
* Peculiar expedition experiences.
* Insights of developments regarding your equipment.
* Observing techniques or helps.
* Summary talks about recent observations.
* Software developments and updates.
* Updates on observing groups (RECON, national occultation organizations, etc.)
* Any work you are doing on occultation science.
* Anything else relevant to occultations.

I suggest that presenters aim for a duration of 20 minutes, but 
longer or shorter time slots can be arranged if appropriate. When in 
doubt, please practice the presentation to ascertain how much time you need.

I am beginning work on the schedule now. I'll be contacting a few of 
you who usually make presentations, in the hope that you will be able 
to continue to contribute.

Art Lucas, a long-time member of IOTA and a distinguished professor 
emeritus at Oklahoma State University, has kindly arranged for us the 
use of the campus facilities. We are most grateful for his help with 
these arrangements.

-- Roger Venable
Vice President, IOTA