June 14 Meeting of the Gloucester Area Astronomy Club, with Steve O’Meara

Our speaker for the June 14 GAAC meeting will be none other than Steve O’Meara, the very accomplished astronomer and writer who, very unexpectedly, observed apparent “spokes” in Saturn’s ring system in 1976. Steve reported observing these phenomena with the 9 inch refractor at Harvard (an interesting account of the reception of O’Meara’s observations is available here, in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage). His observations were discounted by colleagues and professionals, who pointed out that no such thing could persist due to differential rotation of the rings.

Then in 1980 the Voyager 1 spacecraft visited Saturn, reported spokes in the rings, and got credit for the discovery. Some speculate that this may be because of an inherent distrust of visual observation as opposed to photographic astronomy. In his talk, Steve will speak about his observations…