Hi All
I’ve just heard the very sad news of Peter Willams (WPX) passing. Peter was an absolute gentleman and someone I greatly admired. Back in the 80’s and 90’s, he was a great mentor to me on variable stars and was always willing to give me advice. He was one of the pre-eminent southern hemisphere variable star observers.
I met Peter on a number of occasions when travelling to Sydney and attending a number of NACAA conventions in Australia. In fact the last time I caught up with him was 2 years ago at the Parkes convention. Just a wonderful human being.
He was very modest but his astronomy achievements were significant. I think he made well over 180,000 visual observations of variable stars going back over 50 years. His last observations appear in the AID up to 2019, so I’m sure there’s more unreported in the last few years. He also analysed many of his observations and published many papers in the RASNZ VSS Circulars and the AAVSO Journal often of stars that were not well observed and so he brought many new insights as to their properties.
He also visually discovered a comet back in 1998 (C/1998 P1) when observing the dwarf nova EK TrA and well as two novae, all visually. I’ll always remember the evening of 22nd May 1999 when I got a call from a very excited Peter to say he had discovered a bright nova in Vela. I ran outside and saw it with the naked eye very easily. Nova Velorum 1999 would turn out to be the brightest nova since Nova Cygni in 1975. It was all part of his scanning of the night sky with the naked eye before starting an observing session. His knowledge of the night sky was inspiring to me and I’m sure many others.
He will be sadly missed. My condolences to Linda and family. RIP my friend.
Regards
Andrew