The IOPW steering committee met on Monday, October 13, 2008 in the Statler Hotel, Cornell University for breakfast. Glenn Orton presided.

Also present:
Kevin Baines, Imke de Pater, John Clarke, Heidi Hammel, Tommy Greathouse, and Paul Steffes. Henry Roe and Agustin Sanchez-Lavega had difficulty getting to the meeting at 7:30 am, and neither Chris Russell, Bob West nor Tom Stallard attended the DPS this year.

Glenn noted that he would communicate to Chris, who maintains the overall web site, that it needed to be updated with Paul Steffes being in charge of the Laboratory group.

The terms for Kevin Baines and Tom Stallard as rotating members finished, so new members were solicited. Glenn already acted on suggestions from colleagues and invited Tommmy Greathouse in, representing neutral atmsopheres structure and composition. His membership was affirmed by the whole. Suggestions were taken from all on someone working in radio/aurorae/torus, etc., noting that Steve Miller had already served in this capacity. The committee suggested that Glenn ask for his suggestions.

Reports from various chairs:

Heidi Hammel reported that this was a year which included the equinox of Uranus and lots of work was done by astronomers at the VLT, Keck, and Palomar with adaptive optics stabilization. These involved not only the atmosphere but also the rings and included both imaging and spectroscopy. Hubble observations were taken with both snapshot and general observer runs. There were aso some satellite observations of mutual events. Bruno Sicardy worked with the "occultation team" with one successful occultation. Neptune data were also obtained with AO imaging on Keck. Mike Mueller obtained Gemini/Michelle images of Uranus at 18 microns, as did Therese and Glenn in VLT service time with VISIR. Glenn and colleagues also got 20 and 24.5 micron images of Neptune at the VLT and Subaru, respectively. She noted her own poster on the dark spot on Uranus that showed up in 2006 and is still present, as well as the fading of the south collar. Heidi suggested that it might well be time for a post-equinox conference to examine and compare various results. Glenn also noted that the stratsopheric hot spot he and Therese Encrenaz observed about 30 degrees from Neptune's south pole in 2006 is now right at the south pole, as it seemed to be in 2003 and 2005.

John Clarke reported that the past year was dominated by a Hubble Space Telescope campaign ending in February 2008, with 128 orbits. Lots of auroral activity and solar wind correlations were observed. The telescope observing and logistics worked out well, with many results summarized in his poster. He did note, however, that people were not really adding things to his site which is easily linked from the main IOPW site. HST observing time was also provided for observations of Jupiter and Saturn in Cycle 17. At Saturn, of course,Cassini observations continued with the return of of data.

Paul Steffes noted a laboratory measurements session at the DPS. He wondered whether there could be a way for users to put lab measurements on a web page or a web page which linked to useful web pages. It was noted that publications with Elsevier provided archiving of data "in perpetuity".

Glenn Orton reported for the Jupiter and Saturn group that the primary activity was dominated this year by observations of the encounter between the Great Red Spot and the smaller giant red vortex, Oval BA. These included some of the highest resolution observations in the mid-IR, dominated by diffraction from two 8.2-meter telescopes (Subaru and the VLT) and near-IR AO-guided observations using the VLT NACO instrument with 0.14" resolution. Lots of observations were also provided by an increasing number of high-quality amateurs, two of whom were at the DPS. This discipline had a separate meeting at the DPS, with a pretty good attendance, and 4 papers and one poster reported observations of the event. Imke noted that Mike Wong had a poster reporting Jupiter near-IR observations using "MAD", a tested dual-source AO stabilized system at the VLT which was getting ready for deployment/tests at Gemini.