Papers of John Guy Porter

A copy of Porter's script for 'The Night Sky in October' on the winter constellations now becoming visible to the east before midnight - Orion, Taurus and Aldebaran with the Pleiades, Gemini with Castor, and Pollux; Mars being in Gemini, as bright as Capella; Sirius rising after midnight to rival Mars in brightness; the eleven comets discovered in 1960, three new and eight returned, six of the total found by Dr Elizabeth Roemer at the Flagstaff Observatory; this Observatory, the unpopularity of comet-hunting, the bias against women astronomers in the U.S.A., and Dr Roemer's recovery of Encke's Comet; Encke's Comet being related to two meteor showers - the Taurids of October and November and of June, the latter shower being detected by radar as it occurs in daylight; recent American work showing that these meteors had the same orbit as the Comet 5,000 years ago, breaking away then and spreading out over time; the difference between meteorites and shooting stars, meteorites not originating in comets, their probable origin and the mystery of the origin of the tektites; the restricted areas in which tektites are found, the old theory of tektites, the new theory of tektites being meteors, the problem of the clustering of the tektites, the possibility of a lunar origin and the agreement of results calculated 'using one of the big electronic machines' with the observed distribution; and a prediction that it will not be long before we have a sample of the Moon's surface to give the answer.

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