Close to 50 years ago now. I went with Tom Wilson up to Delphos, OH for the annual “August Orgy”. Amazing to meet Leslie and see thru the 6-inch comet seeker and the 12-inch Clark. Got to spend some direct face time with Carolyn Hurless, Tom Cragg, Ernst Meyer, Tom Wilson, Charles Scovil, Clint Ford, David Levy was there and was still active in AAVSO then and others I am forgetting today. A crowd of us slept on Carolyn and Don’s living room floor. As I remember Carolyn had just received the nice custom Maksutov-Cassegrain that was built for her.
One of the best astronomy meetings I ever attended, mixing astronomy with classical harpsichord music. What more could one ask for. Links to AAVSO pages below. No sure who wrote them as they are not signed.
I joined the AAVSO in 1968, so I was certainly observing when Leslie Peltier was alive. Although I was inspired by Starlight Nights, I unfortunately never met its author. I was, however, able to meet some other luminaries of the AAVSO at various meetings in the 1970s: Charles Scovil, Carolyn Hurless, Clint Ford, Margaret Mayall, John Bortle, Dorrit Hoffleit, Joseph Ashbrook, Helen Sawyer Hogg, and Marvin Baldwin, among others. I especially recall the 1973 and 1974 fall meetings, which saw the transition of the directorship from Mayall to Janet Mattei. I was unaware of much that was going on behind the scenes in the AAVSO at that time, so that the history by Williams and Saladyga was something of a revelation when I read it. – H. A. Smith
Reading the histories I see Morgan Cilley was at USNO were I spent most of my career–finished at the U.S. Naval Research Lab. I met Martha Stahr Carpenter at University of Virginia back in around 1980 when I was looking to get a objective spectrum of a star I was interested in from the UVA 10-inch objective prism survey. Of course, Janet Mattei but I didn’t meet her at UVA but at my one and only AAVSO meeting I attended. Janet I talked with several times at night when we were observing dwarf novae to alert her to outbursts starting so she could check/confirm then forward alerts to HEAO-2 and IUE projects. Many other names familiar in those short bios.