Welcome to Houston Astronomical Society

By Will Sager

Walt Cooney was not expecting much excitement on Saturday morning, August 14. The Perseid meteor shower was winding down from its peak at mid-afternoon on August 12 and the Texas CAMS network had already recorded more than 400 and 500 meteors on the previous  two nights. He noticed that the computer controlling his camera station had accumulated a surprising number of meteor files overnight. Before long, he received an email from Peter Jenniskens, director of the CAMS project at NASA Ames Research Center in California, who told him that the Texas and California networks had captured a rare Perseid outburst (see figure), perhaps from the return of a dense filament of the meteoroid stream that killed the Olympus-1 telecommunications satellite in 1993. In all, the Texas network recorded 647 meteors overnight. Walt says the success was “way cool”. Indeed, it was a major accomplishment for the Texas network, which did not exist one year ago. The story made the Spaceweather.com web site (https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2021/08/18/perseid-meteor-outburst-2/). Many human observers missed the outburst because it was well after the traditional peak, so the success demonstrated the importance of routine electronic observations and validated the contributions of amateurs who run the network.

To give credit where credit is due, Time to ‘fess up: I really wish I were skilled and experienced enough to come up with this column on my own.  But the truth is, in May 2019, I had the happy opportunity to spend some time visiting with Stephen James O’Meara as a guest of our own Goldbergs at their home here in Houston.  For those of you who don’t know of him, Stephen is an accomplished and highly-skilled astronomer and author of international fame.  He has a column published every month on visual observing in Astronomy magazine.  For those of you who don’t know Amelia and Steve Goldberg (long-time members of HAS), they are quite accomplished and celebrated astronomers in their own right and are genially nice people.

I have two of Stephen’s Deep-Sky Companions books in my library, The Messier Objects and The Caldwell Objects which he graciously autographed for me.  The Messier Objects is my primary source for this column.  Frankly, it is a bit of a challenge to pick out gems to share here when each object is so full of jewels of amazing information and my space is so limited.  For anyone who is into Messier or Caldwell, or wants to be, these books provide an excellent compendium of facts about the objects, interesting side-lights and back-stories, and insights into these great astronomer’s minds.