DEC - This Month's Astronomy History

- logo -

This Month in the History of Astronomy - December

Birthdays || Discoveries

Dec 1, 1811 - Benjamin (Don Benito) Wilson, namesake of Mount Wilson, CA.
Dec 7, 1905 - Gerard Kuiper, Dutch-born American planetary scientist who discovered moons of both Uranus (see Feb 16) and Neptune (May 1), and Titan's atmosphere, and studied the origins of comets and the solar system.
Even though he never proposed or discussed such a thing, for historical reasons Kuiper is the namesake for the Kuiper Belt, which lies beyond the orbit of Neptune (30 AU) out to ~55 AU, and is thought to contain upwards of 100,000 mainly icy objects larger than 100 km in diameter, of which only a thousand have been discovered (the first was in 1992). Pluto is the largest and most massive member of the Kuiper Belt. Unlike the Oort Cloud, which is spherical in shape and much more distant, the Kuiper Belt is flattened, the main body of objects having orbital inclinations to the ecliptic of ~10° or less and orbital eccentricities of ~0.1 or less.
Dec 11, 1863 - Annie Jump Cannon, pioneer American classifier of stellar spectra; she brought to completion the Henry Draper Catalog (1918), which became the basis for all modern astronomical stellar spectroscopy. It contains 225,320 stars, and HD numbers for stars are still in common use today.
Dec 12, 1803 - James Challis, British astronomer, best known for having flubbed the opportunity to have discovered Neptune.
Challis showed great promise even as a student, winning a place at Trinity College, where he graduated with top honors (1825). In 1836 he succeeded George Airy to the Plumian Professorship of Astronomy at Cambridge, a post he held until his death in 1882, and while serving as director of the observatory there until 1861.
In 1844, John Couch Adams, a young astronomer and mathematician who had recently graduated from Cambridge, approached Challis about getting all the data available at the observatory on the position of Uranus, going back to 1754, with the idea of analyzing its deviations from a perfect orbit to deduce the location of the hypothetical planet causing the gravitational influence. A year later, in September, 1845, Adams returned with the results of his calculations, with the object's estimated orbital path and its coordinates for Oct 1st. Challis didn't think so young and inexperienced an astronomer could possibly be right, so he shelved the report. If he'd looked, he almost certainly would have seen Neptune, less than 2° from where Adams said it would be.
Airy, then at the Greenwich Observatory, and the person who had originally made many of the observations upon which Uranus's perturbed orbit was based, didn't see Adams' work until almost ten months later. He encouraged Challis to look, and he observed Neptune twice -- but didn't recognize it due to a lack of diligence and poor star charts.
Meanwhile, Urbain Leverrier in France had done a similar calculation to Adams and relayed his predicted coordinates to Galle and d'Arrest, who found Neptune immediately (See Sep 23.).
Dec 14, 1546 - Tycho Brahe, Danish pre-telescopic astronomer who established the first modern observatory on the island of Hveen, about 32 km northeast of Copenhagen, in 1582. He gave Kepler his first job in the field.
Dec 15, 1834 - Charles Young, American astronomer who made early spectroscopic observations of the Sun, including the first spectra of both the corona and the reversing layer in the solar atmosphere, which can only be seen during total eclipses.
Dec 16, 1857 - Edward Emerson (E.E.) Barnard, Amercian observational astronomer with many discoveries to his credit: Amalthea, the fifth moon of Jupiter; Barnard's Star, the high proper motion star second nearest to the Sun after Alpha Centauri; 370 dark nebulae in the Milky Way; Barnard's Loop, an emission nebula 10° across encompassing much of the constellation of Orion and probably a 2 million year old supernova remnant; and Barnard's Galaxy (NGC 6822), one of the closest satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. Very early in his career, and with no formal education, Barnard discovered five comets at a time when Hulbert Warner offered a $200 prize for each, allowing him to build a house for himself and his new bride. Barnard has the only honorary degree Vanderbilt University has ever awarded.
Dec 19, 1852 - Albert Michelson, the first U.S. citizen to win a Nobel Prize (Physics, 1907), for his precision measurements of the speed of light.
Michelson was born near what is now the border of Poland and Germany (then called Prussia), but his family emigrated when he was still a toddler, becoming part of the California gold rush aftermath, settling in Nevada. His mathematical talent was recognized early and he was educated in San Francisco. When his application to the US Naval Academy was denied, local VIP's intervened and got him an interview with President Ulysses S. Grant, who over-rode the decision (1869).
Michelson was a believer in the luminiferous ("light-bearing") ether then thought necessary for the electromagnetic waves known as light to wave in, and set out to measure the speed of the earth through this hypothetical medium, something proposed by Maxwell. At Annapolis he made his first measurements, using an improved version of the rotating-mirror method of Léon Foucault (1878-9), but after two years of study in Europe he returned to join the faculty of the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio. There he built his first interferometer, about a meter in diameter. This gave a null result for any motion of the earth, so in 1887 he collaborated with colleague Edward Williams Morley of Western Reserve University, using an interferometer they built about 10m in diameter. This also gave a null result; the value they got for the speed of light is not much different from that used by scientists today (unless they need the utmost precision).
Historians to the present debate whether Einstein was aware of the Michelson-Morley experiment's result while developing special relativity, which rests on the foundation that everyone measures the same value for the speed of light regardless of their relative (constant, unaccelerated) motion.
Dec 20, 1876 - Walter S. Adams, Mt. Wilson astronomer who uncovered the nature of Sirius B, the first known white dwarf star (which was first seen by the famed Alvan Clark in 1862).
Dec 20, 1904 - Founding of the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory.
Dec 21, 1898 - Ira S. Bowen, Caltech laboratory spectroscopist who first ID'd, in 1927, the emission lines seen in the spectra of many gaseous nebulae (like the Orion Nebula) as being due to "forbidden" quantum energy level transitions in common elements like O, N, Ne, and S. These transitions are only "forbidden" in the sense that they aren't usually observed in the laboratory, because a more rarified gas is needed to produce them; even the best laboratory vacuum has such a high enough density of matter that the higher energy level state atoms or ions are collisionally de-excited (destroyed) before the atom can transition to a lower level by emitting radiation from these meta-stable states. In other words, the higher energy level state is long lived enough (milliseconds to seconds rather than microseconds or less) in a sufficiently rarified and/or cold gas that it can radiatively transition to a lower level. Bowen was also the first director of the Palomar Observatory, serving from 1948 until 1964.
Dec 25, 1642 - Isaac Newton, British "inventor" of calculus and much of modern classical physics, including the simple laws of motion and gravity which sufficed until Einstein's time.
Dec 27, 1571 - Johannes Kepler, German protege of the Danish Tycho Brahe in Prague, who used the latter's extensive records of Mars's positions to formulate the three laws of planetary motion still in widespread use today.
Among other contributions to astronomy, Kepler was the first to explain that the reddish color of the moon he'd seen during an eclipse in 1580 was due to wavelength dependent refraction in earth's atmosphere.
Dec 28, 1882 - Arthur S. Eddington, British theoretical astrophysicist who was instrumental in showing why stars are the way they are and how their interior conditions can be suitable for the hydrogen fusion reactions which power them. He also gave the name "expanding universe" to the mutual recession of the galaxies.
Dec 28, 1929 - Maarten Schmidt, Dutch-born American astronomer who first measured the high redshifts characteristic of quasars.
Schmidt did his Ph.D. under the famed Jan Oort at Leiden University (1956) and got on at the California Institute of Technology in 1959 to do theoretical work on the mass distribution and dynamics of galaxies. The Schmidt Law relates the rate of star formation in the gas in a galaxy to the density of interstellar gas.
Several years later he got involved in the optical identification of newly found radio sources, using the 200" telescope. While the spectrum of the 12.9 magnitude "star" 3C 273 was a first baffling, Schmidt eventually recognized the pattern characteristic of hydrogen emission lines, only redshifted by nearly 16%, an unheard of amount at the time (1963). By Hubble's Law this implied an immense distance for the object and therefore an intrinsic luminosity at least ~100x that of a galaxy like the Milky Way.
Schmidt was awarded the Henry Norris Russell Prize and elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978. In 1980, he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Dec 31, 1864 - Robert G. Aitken, American observer who discovered and catalogued more than 3100 double and binary stars.
Dec 31, 1864 - George Willis Ritchey, expert optician and telescope maker, and astronomer, who worked first at Yerkes Observatory and then at Mount Wilson, where he was largely responsible for the 60" and 100" mirrors, the largest in the world at the time. The former went into operation in December, 1908, and Ritchey used it to take photos of the moon, star clusters, and nebulae, the likes of which had never been seen. They were distributed on the lecture circuit and appeared in books on astronomy for years.
The glass disk for the 100" arrived at the shops in Pasadena the same month, but took many years to fund, grind, figure, and mount, and by the time it went into astronomical operation Ritchey and Mt. Wilson director Hale had had a falling out and Ritchey never got to observe with it.
Circa 1910, Ritchey met French mathematician, optician, and astronomer Henri Chrétien, along with whom the Ritchey-Chrétien design, now the standard basis for almost all large telescopes, was worked out. This greatly enlarged the "good field" of view (at the focus) over regular designs utilizing a parabolic primary mirror, making wide field photography with large telescopes a reality.
[Chrétien later developed (1927) the anamorphic lens system of cinematography for widescreen movie projection, originally called the Hypergonar process, but later known popularly by names such as CinemaScope (1953), VistaVision (1954, which started the 3:2 horizontal format later adopted for 35mm film still cameras), and Panavision (which used anamorphic prime lenses, 1957). The idea is a lens in front of the camera lens squeezes or scrunches the image horizontally for recording onto the film, while a complementary lens over the film projector stretches it back out to as much as a 2¾:1 aspect ratio.]
On July 19, 1917, Ritchey discovered the new star, now known as SN 1917A, in the galaxy NGC 6946, and from its faint magnitude (14.6) argued that for such a nova to be so faint the galaxy must be far outside the Milky Way not within it. He had earlier observed the expanding nebulosity around Nova Perseii (1901) and knew Milky Way novae were typically much brighter. It was still to be some 15-20 years before objects like SN 1917A were recognized as a distinct class of objects, namely supernovae. NGC 6946 is a starburst galaxy and has had ten SNe discovered in it in all over the century since Ritchey found the first one.

Discoveries and other firsts

200" mirror blank before grinding and polishing

Dec 2, 1870 - Spectroscopist Jules Janssen (see Aug 18, 1868) escapes the German siege of Paris in a balloon in order to observe the solar eclipse in Algeria twenty days later (see below), making it there only to get clouded out.
Dec 2, 1934 - The mirror blank for the 200-inch telescope is cast in Corning, NY. (photo @ right) Also see below.
Dec 2, 1995 - Launch of the ESA/NASA satellite SOHO (SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory), which led to the discovery that coronal mass ejections occur almost daily.
Dec 3, 1971 -- The USSR's Mars 3 becomes the first spacecraft to make a soft landing on the red planet.
Dec 3, 1973 - The US's Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to achieve escape velocity from the solar system, is the first to flyby Jupiter. At 12:26 EST it passed the orbit of Callisto and entered the inner Jovian system; even at 130,000 Km/Hr (81,000 mph) it took 16 hours to complete its mission. It continued on for 29+ years before it's nuclear power source and distance from earth (80 AU then) caused its radio transmissions to be too faint for us to be able to detect it; contact was lost on Jan 3, 2003. Pioneer 11 flew by Jupiter one year later.
Dec 4, 1639 - Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree are the first people to witness a transit of Venus (across the sun), making measurements which allowed them to determine its apparent diameter. Kepler's calculations suggested the next transit of Venus (after the 1631 event) would not occur until the next century, but Horrocks, a young British amateur astronomer did his own calculations, but they were completed only a month before the event so there was no time to publicize them, and so he and his friend Crabtree were the only ones to observe it.
Dec 4, 1978 - The U.S.'s Pioneer/Venus Orbiter becomes the first spacecraft to orbit Venus.
Dec 5, 2020 - Japan's Hayabusa 2 spacecraft returns to earth the first ever samples of an asteroid, 162173 Ryugu. The capsule containing the estimated 100 milligrams of material landed in the Woomera Prohibited Area in southern Australia as planned. Hayabusa 1 had previously returned tiny shards from the asteroid 25143 Itokawa on Jun 13, 2010. Hayabusa 2 was launched Dec 3, 2014, and reached the near-earth asteroid Jun 27, 2018.
Nearly two years later the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) reported that 5.4 grams of material had been returned and that the mixture of iron isotopes in the samples is indistinguishable from that of CI carbonaceous chondrite meteorites. This type of meteorite is likely primordial, surviving unchanged through the development of the solar system, but it’s also rare: only a few examples have survived the fall to Earth, such as the Ivuna meteorite found in Tanzania in 1938. CI carbonaceous chondrites are difficult to locate once on the ground because of their greyish color and because they quickly absorb rain water and decompose into mud. They have an isotopic signature closer to that of the original solar nebula, and some analyses of their trapped gases have isotopic signatures consistent with having formed around red giants or in supernovae. Thus, this is some of the most primitive material known. How it got to an earth-crossing location is a mystery.
Dec 7, 185 - Likely the first ever recorded supernova, now known as SN 185, was noted by Chinese astronomers (and possibly the Romans, too), even though it occurred in the far southern skies at a declination of more than -62°. The remnant, now known as RCW 86, is about 45 arc-minutes in diameter, an estimated 2,800 pc away, and modern measurements are consistent with the implied age. The brightness of the supernova (-4 apparent magnitude) would have likely been almost comparable to Venus at its brightest. The 'guest star' was visible in the nighttime sky for eight months.
Dec 7, 1631 - French astronomer Pierre Gassendi (see Nov 7, 1631), using Kepler's best calculations, makes the first attempt to observe a transit of Venus across the sun. Modern calculations show that it was not visible from Europe. It would be 130 years later before such an event was observed.
Dec 7, 1968 - The first successful Orbiting Astronomical Observatory satellite -- the first space telescope -- OAO-2 Stargazer, is launched into orbit. OAO-1, launched 20 months earlier, had suffered a power failure three days after launch and its instruments never powered up.
OAO-2 operated for five years in the ultra-violet part of the spectrum, being succeeded by OAO-3 Copernicus in 1972. Its best remembered discovery perhaps was that a comet (Tago-Sato-Kosaka) was surrounded by a large halo of hydrogen, confirming it was made up of a large amount of H₂O. The satellite also resulted in a catalog of 5,068 UV stars, even though only 10% of the sky was covered before the instrument failed after about two years.
Dec 7, 1972 - The famous Blue Marble picture of Earth was taken by the crew of Apollo 17 from ~29,000 km (18,000 mi) away -- hardly 7-8% of the way to the moon. Known as NASA photo AS17-148-22727, it was the first time the trajectory made it possible to photograph the South polar ice cap.
Dec 7, 1995 - NASA's Galileo spacecraft, orbiting Jupiter, drops its atmospheric probe into the planet and it transmits data back to Earth for nearly an hour before succumbing to the heat and pressure. It detects only about 1/10th the amount of water vapor as had been expected, and only ~½ the helium abundance of the Sun. There were also high levels of the heavy noble gases krypton and xenon. Organic compounds, including hydrocarbons, were also conclusively detected there for the first time.
Dec 8, 1845 - The fifth astroid, Astraea, is discovered. The find is notable for several reasons:
- It was made 38 years after the fourth asteroid (Vesta) was discovered, the first four all having been found in a span of just six years, from 1801-07.
- The discoverer was an amateur, the German Karl Ludwig Hencke, using a small telescope.
- Hencke had been searching for such a thing for fifteen years.
Hencke was quite familiar with the field the object was in at the time, but originally thought he'd found a new variable star, one that had brightened enough to at last be detectable. It was the famous astronomer Johann Encke who, having read about it in the newspaper, observed the new "star" a few days later, and noticed its motion against the background stars, thus confirming it as an asteroid. Two years later, Hencke would discover the sixth asteroid (Hebe), in the same year that #'s 7 and 8 were also found.
Dec 8, 1847 - The Great Southern Comet of 1947 (C/1947 X1) appears suddenly in the sky, visible to thousands of people in places like South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, just six days after its perihelion passage only 0.11 AU from the sun.
The comet had a distinctly orange head and the tail was reported stretching at least 25° across the sky. It left almost as quickly as it appeared, being all but beyond naked eye brightness a mere two weeks later. It had a nearly parabolic orbit (e=0.99955) and an estimated period of 3800 years.
Dec 10, 1974 - The launch of the first of the twin Helios spacecraft to study the sun, the solar wind, and the environment of the inner solar system, with Helios B (or 2) following 13 months later (Jan 15, 1976). Both spacecraft were sent into eccentric orbits around the sun with periods of ~190 days and perihelion distances of ~0.3 AU, closer than the orbit of Mercury. Helios B set a spacecraft speed record of 70.22 km/sec at its Apr 17, 1976, perihelion passage.
Dec 12, 1971 - The launch of the first x-ray satellite, Uhuru. It's mission ended in March, 1973, and its final catalog consisted of 339 objects. It also gave the location for Cygnus X-1 (which had been discovered during a rocket flight in 1964), the first really good black hole candidate ever found.
Dec 13, 1795 - At 3:30 PM, John Shipley is sprayed with mud by the nearby impact of a 25 kg meteorite falling into the field he was working near Wold Cottage, England, accompanied by the smell of sulfur. The meteorite was prominently displayed in London, where for a small fee the public could view the object and receive a small informative pamphlet. The site would subsequently host the only monument in the world erected at the site of a meteorite fall (photo at right).
Dec 13, 1920 - The first stellar diameter (Betelgeuse) is measured by Francis Pease with an interferometer at Mount Wilson.
Dec 14, 1962 - The U.S.'s Mariner 2 flies by Venus at a distance of only 21,600 miles and becomes the first successful interplanetry probe.
Ground-based radio astronomers, observing at 3.15 cm (9½ GHz), had only recently (1956) measured a surface temperature on Venus of about 600°F, and Mariner 2 was able to confirm this incredibly high value. The figure would lead to a Ph.D. thesis by Carl Sagan and a vastly improved understanding of how the greenhouse effect operates on planets, and how planetary atmospheres in general evolve over time.
Mariner 2 also measured interplanetary magnetic field strengths, as well as finding Venus's magnetic field to be at or below the instrument's noise level of a few nanoteslas. The absence of a strong magnetic field like earth's is thought to be a consequence of Venus's slow spin rate.
Dec 14, 1972 - This is actually a last: the last humans to date to be on the moon (Apollo 17) return to earth, with Eugene Cernan leaving the final bootprint at Taurus-Littrow and calling it the "end of the beginning".
Dec 14, 2013 - The unmanned Chang’e-3 lunar lander and its Yutu (or Jade Rabbit) rover make China the third country to land a spacecraft on the moon, Mare Imbrium to be specific.
Dec 15, 1970 - The USSR's Venera 7 touches down on Venus and becomes the first successful soft landing on another planet.
Dec 19, 2013 - The European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft and precision astrometric observatory was launched, the successor to the Hipparcos mission (which was operational from 1989-93) but with 100x better precision, and with the intention of measuring the positions and motions of approximately one billion objects -- mostly stars, but also comets, asteroids, and quasars -- brighter than magnitude 20. Gaia will also do photometry and spectroscopy; with the latter it is possible to measure radial velocities and thus determine space motions from the proper motions.
Each object will be observed 70 times over five years, and the expected accuracy in annual proper motion measurements is just 20 micro-arcseconds (µas) at 15th magnitude (200 µas at mag 20).
On Aug 30, 2014, Gaia discovered its first supernova, a Type Ia, in a galaxy about half a billion light years away, hardly a month after it began science operations (Jul 25). Gaia is expected to discover about 3 SNe per day.
Dec 21, 1947 - Don O. Hendrix and Ira S. Bowen make the first "first light", visual observations of stars with the 200-inch telescope. The next night photographic tests were made with a full aperture Hartmann screen in front of the telescope to map the mirror's figure. After an additional iteration of figuring and polishing in the optical shop in Pasadena, the better shape led to the determination that there was too much friction in the mirror's support structure, designed in 1935, causing the mirror to deform as the telescope was moved to different spots on the sky. There was also a thermal deformation problem discovered, due to the amount of heat the huge mass of glass retained; with different parts at different temperatures, the differential expansion distorted the surface's shape. With the support system re-designed and re-built, and both insulation and cooling fans added, fixing those issues, an upturned edge was revealed. Progress was slow because such star tests give their greatest precision when done under conditions of the best seeing, which typically occurs on Mount Palomar in the early Fall (Sep and Oct). Therefore it would be almost two years later before the mirror's figure was judged to be in tip-top shape and the telescope went into routine, scheduled, scientific observations.
Dec 22, 968 - A chronicler in Constantinople provides the first clear description of the Sun's corona seen during a total eclipse.
Dec 22, 1870 - American Charles A. Young observes the solar eclipse in Spain and shows that the chromosphere is the layer in the sun's atmosphere where the dark lines in its normal spectrum (discovered by Fraunhofer in 1817) are formed. The same lines are seen in emission, as bright lines, rather than in absorption, in the spectrum of the chromosphere.
Dec 22-23, 1947 - Jodrell Bank first makes some of the earliest radio wavelength observations of a meteor shower, namely the Ursids, which it continued to do up thru 1953. (Their radiant is in Ursa Minor, near the star β, aka Kochab, and the responsible comet is 8P/Tuttle.) Hourly count rates derived from radio observatories are an important suppliment to those compiled by visual observers, who are often hampered by clouds, which of course is not a problem at radio wavelengths.
Dec 23, 1672 - Giovanni Cassini discovers Saturn's moon Rhea.
Dec 24, 1968 - The U.S.'s Apollo 8 is the first manned spacecraft to orbit the moon.
Dec 25, 1758 - Halley's Comet is first spotted after Halley's 1705 prediction of its return in late 1758 or early 1759. It would pass perihelion on Mar 13, 1759, and make its closest approach to earth on Apr 26.
Dec 26, 1783 - William Herschel discovers the small nebula associated with the star R Monocerotis, later catalogued as NGC 2261. It became known as Hubble's Variable Nebula after his analysis of it using early photographic material stretching from 1900-1916. The nebula's variability had been discovered using a 6" refractor in 1861, by J.F. Julius Schmidt at the National Observatory of Greece in Athens.
It is now considered the prototypical 'cometary nebula' for its fan shape, not for having anything to do with comets, the star being embedded in the small end of the object. It is also of a class known as 'cocoon nebulae', in that a dusty envelope of material surrounds the star completely, which is typically of the T Tauri variety of (young) variables, obscuring it from direct view. The dust both absorbs and scatters the star's light, and clumps of denser material moving around near to the star (proto-planets?) cast shadows on the more distant parts of the cloud, causing the appearance of such nebulae to change over time scales of months (sometimes less). A few such variable nebulae have even been known to disappear completely at optical (not IR) wavelengths.
Dec 28, 1612 - The first known observation, by Galileo, of what almost 2½ centuries later would be recognized as the planet Neptune.
Galileo was observing Jupiter's moons, and even noted the following month (also on the 28th) when he was making similar observations with Jupiter nearing opposition a month or two later that one star in the field was farther away from a second star than it had been the previous night. He evidently didn't think anything more of the apparent movement and didn't follow it up. He was engrossed then in the orbits of what we now call the Galilean moons of Jupiter.
One can view this conjunction on planetarium software programs; Jupiter/Neptune rose almost due E at about 10 PM in Florence, Italy, on the evening of Jan 28, 1613.
Dec 28, 1904 - French astronomer Alphonse Borrelly at the Marseilles Observatory discovers Comet 19P/Borrelly. With an orbital period of 6.9 years it is a member of the Jupiter family of comets, making its 18th appearance in late 2021 and early 2022. It was the second comet (after Halley) to be imaged close up, by NASA's Deep Space 1 in Sep 2001, from a distance of only 1350 miles. It is bowling-pin shaped, with a maximum length of ~5 miles, and is very dark, presumably because of all the dust left behind by the sublimation of ices during its many visits to the early solar system.
Dec 28, 1969 - Comet Bennett (1969 Y1) is discovered by John Caister Bennett, an accomplished South African amateur astronomer. The first of two bright comets in the 1970's -- the other being Comet West in 1976 -- it reached magnitude zero or a little brighter around the time of perihelion passage (Mar 20, 1970) and its closest approach to earth six days later.
Seen by millions, during April it sported two prominent tails (one curved) stretching up to 20° as it headed N on its highly inclined orbit. It was scheduled to be photographed by Apollo 13 three days after launch (Apr 14), but on the night of the 13th the near-disaster for which the mission was famous for surviving scotched these plans.

©2002-2023, Chris Wetherill. All rights reserved. Display here does NOT constitute or imply permission to copy, republish, or redistribute my work in any manner for any purpose without prior written permission.

[ Back to November || On to January ]

[ To: History Directory || Main VISNS page ]