LVAAS General Meeting at South Mountain
Sunday, November 9, 7 p.m. at LVAAS South Mountain Headquarters
Presenter is in person
"Meteorites and their Origins"
Featuring Ray Harris
Ray Harris, former director and life member of LVAAS, will speak on Meteorites. He’ll review the classification of various kinds of meteorites, the properties which make them unique and what this tells us about their origins.
Ray is the son of a career Naval officer and grew up mostly near Naval facilities in Virginia and California, graduating high school on the Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He attended Yale University and upon graduation spent five years in the Navy supervising reactor operations on a nuclear submarine. Ray left the service for a career in civilian nuclear power. He joined PPL in Allentown in 1980 as staff supporting the Susquehanna nuclear power plants in Berwick. He later moved into PPL corporate IT before retiring in 2009 but he got bored with retirement and currently works part-time as a school bus driver.
In 1984, Ray bought a C-8. He joined LVAAS in 1985 and began exploring and photographing the night sky (back before the digital imaging age). His photo of the Horsehead Nebula appeared in the January 1990 issue of Sky & Telescope. In 1987 he purchased a pair of celestial charts published in 1741. He discovered a couple of deep-sky objects on these charts and for the past 38 years, Ray has been researching and collecting early celestial charts and atlases. Ray’s article “The First Deep-Sky Atlas” appeared in the January 2022 issue of Sky & Telescope and his article “The Constellations of Petrus Plancius" appeared in the February 2023 issue. Ray resides in Macungie, PA, with his wife who does not share his interest in astronomy but who does share his love of early celestial charts as works of art.
Prospective new members who wish to attend the meeting should email membership@lvaas.org.
