Vast fields of marble-sized chunks of ice and rock spun slowly in the darkness this week, and I sat in the back of a grey conference room with white plastic tables spread with papers and laptops. I was sitting in on a meeting of an international team of astronomers gathered to analyze data from the Herschel Infrared Observatory. This telescope, sometimes just called Herschel, orbits the Sun about a million miles from the Earth.

The following is from the July, 1978 issue of the newsletter of the Houston Astronomical Society provided to me by Steve and Amelia Goldberg. References to various charts in the text were changed here.

The July observing project, like that in June, is a faint but interesting object. The star AM Herculis has been known to be a variable star since 1923. In the past few years however, it has been discovered that AM her is also the x-ray source 3U 1809+50. Recent studies of this interesting object indicate that it is a binary star. The members of the pair include a cool star of about half the diameter and mas of the sun, and a white dwarf with a mass approximately equal to that of the sun. The visual brightness of AM Her varies from ~ 12m when the white dwarf is not eclipsed by the cool star, to fainter than 14m. Because of the absence of the x-rays during the eclipse, these became known as the “on’ condition and the “off” condition. The period of rotation is 03 hours, 05 minutes and 38 seconds, so the “on condition is visible during some portion of every night for observation.

“Science is the one human activity that is truly progressive. “ Edwin Powell Hubble

“I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.” -- Carl Sagan