Word: comets
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Station Born of Comet...
...start at the University in 1839, when William C. Bond, later to become first director of the Observatory, organized a star-gazers' club, meeting bi-monthly in Dana House. Interest, however, waned, and the club was on the point of dissolution when, in March, 1843, a brilliant comet saved the day for astronomy at Harvard...
Streaking across the afternoon sky, this comet brought astronomers from all corners of the nation to Cambridge, where, it was rumored, existed an observation station. Disappointment was great upon discovery of University astronomers peering skyward with hand-shielded but naked eye, just as the visitors had already done...
...earth's favorite playmates in the lonely vastness of space is the Gia-cobini-Zinner comet, which sweeps around the sun in a lopsided orbit once every six and a half years. In 1933, two sweeps ago, the earth passed within 500,000 miles of the place where the comet had been 80 days before. The result: a gaudy shower of meteors...
This year, the comet was due again, and astronomers calculated that this time the earth would pass only 131,000 miles from the place it had been eight days before. As astronomers measure distances, this is a cat's-whisker miss. The earth's gravitational pull would capture thousands, perhaps millions, of meteors: small bits of straggling comet stuff. When they plunged into the atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour and turned into incandescent gas, the show would be the best since...