Cosmic Reflections

A Tucson Symphony Suggestion

If the Tucson Symphony published a list of every piece they have ever played, I can guarantee you that I could provide them with a list of dozens of great orchestral works from past and present times that they have never played that I am certain would be well received by the listening public. And I am sure there are other TSO season subscribers who could also make such a list of never-before-programmed yet accessible works. My point is—and this would apply to any symphony orchestra—that some of us classical music lovers have devoted a lot of time and energy uncovering great music that is not part of the standard repertoire. Yes, we do love the standard repertoire as much as anyone, but wouldn’t it be exciting to regularly hear great orchestral works that our beloved orchestra has never played before?

Composer and musicologist Robert Greenberg speaks frankly and convincingly about this and related subjects at the end of the last episode of his 2011 DVD lecture series The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works¹:

What Will Happen to the Orchestra?

Any institution that relies strictly on the past to preserve its future is dead meat. America’s orchestras do not perform nearly enough contemporary music and are therefore failing to create that very repertoire that will guarantee their relevance into the future. Assuming that I am right about this, and I most certainly am, we must then ask whose fault is this? The answer, sadly, is the obvious one. It’s our fault. It’s the audience’s fault.

Orchestras are market-driven institutions that are struggling to stay alive. The margin between breaking even and bankruptcy-inducing debt can be the ticket sales for just a few concerts. For the most part, modern audiences go to concerts to be entertained by music that is familiar, a fact that militates entirely against the creation of new repertoire. I, for example, would love to compose for orchestra, but I will not waste my precious time writing music that will never be played or that will only be performed once. This is a sentiment shared by virtually every one of my colleagues whose creative energies are being lavished instead on chamber music and vocal music.

By my unofficial count, there are 223 professional orchestras in the United States and Puerto Rico, most of them regional orchestras. In a world in which the basic repertoire has been recorded a thousand times over at a time when more and more people are forgoing the comradery of the concert hall in favor of consuming their music in their cars and in front of their computer screens, the great bulk of those 223 orchestras will simply become irrelevant in a generation unless they do something to make themselves relevant. Taking music to the schools certainly helps as does giving performances in unusual venues. But, really, it is music that feeds the orchestral beast, and without the roughage provided by fresh music, the beast will die of unrelieved constipation.

Cultivating and performing new orchestral music is not an aspect of an orchestra’s mission or even a duty. No. Along with playing the pre-existing repertoire, cultivating and performing new music is the orchestra’s very reason to be. Just as living things mate and reproduce in order to guarantee the survival of their genetic lines, so the orchestra as an institution must create viable repertoire in order to stay relevant and therefore to survive. In this, orchestras must lead and not be led by polls that ask their audiences what music they should perform. There should be a piece of new music five to eight minutes long on every concert program, with a longer featured new work appearing, say, two or three times a season.

When it comes to new music, charity starts at home. Local composers should be cultivated, commissioned, and then paraded on stage before the performance so that (1) the audience can see that they are indeed alive, and (2) so that the the composers might briefly describe what their pieces are about. Conductors must become, as they once were, advocates for fresh repertoire. The orchestral players, realizing that their careers are at stake, must forgo their usual cynicism and lassitude over having to learn a new piece and actually practice their parts at home so that the brief amount of rehearsal time allotted to the new work can be used effectively. The performances of these new works should be posted on an orchestra’s website so that anyone, anywhere can hear what is fresh and new and exciting, in Texarkana, or Sarasota, or Hartford, or Oakland.

Regional orchestras should band together to create consortia that would commission emerging and mid-career composers of promise to compose works, particularly concertos that would feature the section leaders of the orchestras themselves. Yes, charity starts at home. Why bring in an overpriced outsider when your own principal flutist, for example, would be thrilled to be a featured soloist.

The composers themselves also have a huge responsibility as well. I would suggest that they take a page from Aaron Copland’s compositional career. Copland’s chamber music tends to be quite virtuosic and uncompromising in its modernity, while his orchestral music, which he knew he was writing for a wider public, tends to be relatively less virtuosic and more accessible. Now, Copland wasn’t writing down to his orchestral audiences. No. He was writing smart on exactly these lines and in direct opposition to the modernist screed, “Who cares if you listen?” Contemporary composers must care who listens. And if we want the traditional orchestral audience to re-embrace what is new, we as composers have to be willing to meet the audience halfway by composing music that gives something back immediately in terms of rhythm, melody, harmony, and expressive content. In all fairness to most living composers, I would point out that the daunting and ferociously modernistic music of the post-World War II era, music that gave the phrase “modern music” a bad name, has been pretty much a thing of the past since the 1980s. Generally, but accurately speaking, most contemporary composers would no more write such ear-scalding music than drink battery acid.

The local media, radio, and press must commit themselves to new programming as well, with the knowledge that by doing so they, too, will be making themselves culturally relevant. A sense of importance and occasion could be built around the performances of even short pieces of new music that could begin to transform an orchestra’s self and public image.

Speaking of the public, it is all too easy to be cynical about public taste. From David Hannum’s famous line, misattributed to P.T. Barnum, that there’s a sucker born every minute, to H.L. Mencken’s admonition to never overestimate the intelligence of the American people, we are faced daily with the evidence of our cultural cretinism, from network television to Chia Pets, but I would point out that a concert hall is not a baseball stadium and that filling the seats of a concert hall is not a matter of drawing 45,000 people but rather of attracting those people who are predisposed, or who could be made to be predisposed, towards concert music in the first place. I am just foolish enough to believe that if you give the music-liking public a reason to believe there’s something new and exciting happening at the concert hall that they can’t get and won’t find anywhere else, they might very well show up!

We can only hope that at least some of this comes to pass because I fear that the epitaph, particularly for regional orchestras, is already being written. “Here lies an organizational dinosaur that never figured out how to maintain its duty to the past while staying relevant to the present.” Let us hope that such reports of the orchestra’s possible demise are entirely premature.

I would like to offer a few comments on Greenberg’s enlightening essay.

The Tucson Symphony, like many orchestras I’m sure, frequently presents new and often commissioned works, though they are always short, no more than 10 or 15 minutes in length. Many of these works are pleasant enough to listen to, but where are the more substantial works? The new symphonies and the new concertos? Also, there is an overemphasis on works from the Americas. In my opinion, most of these works are heavy on percussion and light on melody, harmony, and thematic development. I find what is going on in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, to be much more interesting and substantial. I would like to see some of these contemporary European works played. And there are many, many works from the past from all over the world that are not in the standard repertoire that also deserve to be regularly heard.

Greenberg brings up a disquieting thought: that composers won’t write what won’t get played. In other words, it may be that the reason we don’t have more symphonies, tone poems, suites, and concertos being written today is that the public isn’t demanding and, yes, paying for them. We could all be doing more to encourage composers to write longer and more substantial orchestral works and to see that they get performed by many orchestras and, yes, commercially recorded and released on CD. I do think this is more of a problem in the United States than it is in Europe, however.

In conclusion—and to expand on my original suggestion for the TSO—are there any orchestras that provide a complete list of all the works they have ever played on their website, and that invite suggestions for works not on this list from their concertgoers, and that program some of them? How exciting that would be!

Greenberg, Robert. 2011. The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works. The Great Courses. ↩︎

Cecilia Payne and Gustav Holst

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979), as a woman, had to endure an enormous number of challenges and setbacks but her perseverance, professional dedication, and brilliance led her to become one of the important astrophysicists in the 20th century. In her 1925 Ph.D. thesis, Cecilia Payne demonstrated that stars are primarily composed of hydrogen and helium. This was highly controversial at the time, but she was eventually proved correct. In 1960, the noted astronomer Otto Struve called her 1925 thesis, Stellar Atmospheres; A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.” Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin would make an excellent subject for a full-length documentary as well as a biographical movie, and it is disgraceful that neither has been done yet.

I recently completed teaching a new five-week course on the English composer Gustav Holst (1874-1934). The research I did for that course plus my lifelong interest in astrophysics naturally led me to take an interest in the relationship between Cecilia Payne and Gustav Holst. Clearly from what you will see below, they had profound respect and admiration for each other.

Cecilia Payne attended St. Paul’ Girls’ School, where Gustav Holst taught, during the 1918-1919 school year. However, Holst left for war service in Salonika, Greece on October 29, 1918 and didn’t return to St. Paul’s until the 1919-1920 school year, after Payne had graduated and gone on to the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England.

Frances Ralph Gray was the founding “high mistress” of St. Paul’s School for Girls in the Brook Green neighborhood of London…Like Cecilia, she adored music; unlike Cecilia, she had had great difficulty learning mathematics. Also unlike Cecilia, she was small in stature. She was, however, commanding in presence. Students reported that being sent to see Miss Gray “was their greatest fear.”

Frances perceived that there was something different about the seventeen-year-old girl in her office who so wanted to be admitted. Yes, Cecilia had been told to leave her current school, but not because she was disruptive or a problem learner—quite the opposite. She was a serious student who loved music and science, whose goal was to go to Cambridge. She had responded to Elizabeth Edwards and to Dorothy Daglish. If St. Paul’s had similar teachers who could recognize Cecilia’s love of learning and would take time to nurture her, surely she would be a good fit.

Years later, in a touching letter recommending Cecilia for a fellowship at Harvard, Frances wrote: “It is not my practice to admit girls who have reached the age at which Cecilia Payne was admitted [age seventeen], but I was requested to make an exception in her case by the headmistress of the School she had previously attended, who assured me that she was a girl of very unusual promise.”

Unbeknownst to Cecilia, St. Paul’s needed her as much as she needed the school. Founded just over a decade earlier by the Worshipful Company of Mercers, it prided itself on consistently outperforming other schools. The “Paulinas” were not viewed as, or trained to be, socialites; this was a serious school. The social snobbery of other private schools had no place here.

Cecilia described her move to St. Paul’s as stepping from medieval times into the modern day. Instead of chapels there were laboratories—in biology, chemistry, physics—and teachers who were specialists. Here she was not just “allowed” to study science; she was encouraged. She only attended the school for one year. But from the moment she approached the Queen Anne-style pink brick building and walked up the stone steps and through the marble and oak arched front door, she was home.¹

Donovan Moore goes on now to write about Holst.

Frances Gray…made good on her professed love of music when she hired Gustav Holst. Holst was a relatively unknown trombone player when he accepted the job of director of music at St. Paul’s. Like Cecilia, he was shy and reserved, and he disdained fame. And like Cecilia, he was practiced in overcoming obstacles: neuritis in his right arm had forced him to stop playing the trombone and the piano, so he had to turn to composing.

Frances encouraged him; in fact, she worked with him, supplying the text for both a light-hearted masked dance in 1909 and a more ambitious orchestra work three years later. She had an entire music wing built in 1913, including a large soundproof room where Gustav composed on Sundays, when the school was locked up, in silence and solitude. It was in this room that he wrote his most famous work, the orchestra suite The Planets. Cecilia was among a group of students who heard it performed shortly after it was composed.²

As we shall see later through Cecilia’s own words, she must have heard some sort of run-through of The Planets at St. Paul’s. I wonder whether she was among the invited audience of about 250 people who attended the first performance of The Planets at Queen’s Hall, London, on Sunday, September 29, 1918, with Adrian Boult conducting the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra? Given that the choir for “Neptune: The Mystic” in that performance was comprised, in whole or in part, of students from St. Paul’s, it is possible she was present for the Queen’s Hall performance though perhaps unlikely given that the audience consisted of close friends and associates of Holst and many professional musicians in London.

Holst was also a great teacher. For three decades—from 1905 until his death in 1934—”Gussie”, as he was known, would cast his musical spell over his students. The contemporary composer Ralph Vaughan Williams described Holst’s long tenure at St. Paul’s: “He did away with the childish sentimentality that schoolgirls were supposed to appreciate and substituted Bach and Vittoria; a splendid background for immature minds.”

Holst discerned Cecilia’s love of music. He asked her to play her violin for him, made her a member of the school’s orchestra, and taught her how to conduct. He encouraged her to become a musician but did not prevail. Cecilia instinctively felt that a career in music would control her; as a scientist, she would be in control.³

In her autobiography, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin writes of St. Paul’s, Holst, and music:

The school ministered to my twin loves, science and music. Here I came under the spell of Gustav Holst, or “Gussie” as we affectionately called him. Aside from my shadowy Father, and my schoolboy brother, he was the first man I ever knew. He radiated music; the organ in the great hall reverberated to the great Toccata and fugue of Bach. Here for the first time I heard The Planets (then newly composed) and took part in a performance of the Hymn of Jesus. He was like a father to us, shy, abrupt and charming. He was quick to learn of my love of music, asked me to play the violin to him, and urged me to become a musician. I played in the orchestra, and learned conducting from him, but my love of science triumphed. It seems odd to think that the only career I was ever encouraged to follow was that of a musician. As a student at Cambridge I trained and conducted a choir that won an award. One of the judges told me that my conducting had been the decisive factor, and that my future lay there. Indeed, the feelings evoked by conducting a choir or orchestra are so powerful as to be overwhelming, but I recoiled instinctively from something I felt would control me; as a scientist I should be in control of my material. Who knows whether I was right?⁴

St. Paul’s Girls’ School did indeed have a great hall with an organ, so one wonders how Cecilia Payne heard The Planets there. It is also interesting that she first heard The Hymn of Jesus at St. Paul’s during her 1918-1919 school year, as the first known performance was on March 10, 1920 at the Royal College of Music with Holst conducting. Though Holst began composing the work during the summer of 1917, it was apparently not completed until after he returned from war service in Salonika, Greece on June 29, 1919. Cecilia Payne must have heard an early version of the work, or a part of it that had been completed.

Following four years at the University of Cambridge, Cecilia Payne arrived in New York aboard the RMS Laconia on Thursday, September 20, 1923, and from there proceeded to Cambridge, Massachusetts to begin her work in astronomy at Harvard University. Just a few months earlier, Gustav & Isobel Holst had visited the United States from April 27 through June 12, 1923. This was Isobel Holst’s only visit to the U.S., but Gustav would make two more visits, in 1929 and again in 1932.

Gustav Holst was in the United States from April 16-27, 1929, and on the evening of Friday, April 26, 1929, Holst gave a well-received lecture at Harvard University. It seems likely that Cecilia Payne would have attended that lecture and visited with Holst, but he was only in Cambridge for a day and had to take an early morning train to New York to board the RMS Samaria for the trip back to England. I have not been able to find any evidence that indicates they saw each other during Holst’s 1929 American visit.

Nor have I found any evidence that Cecilia Payne visited Holst in England after she moved to the United States in 1923, though New York ship passenger records show she arrived in New York from Southampton, England aboard the SS Leviathan on September 21, 1925, aboard the SS Berengaria on January 3, 1929, and aboard the SS Bremen on October 7, 1931 and August 30, 1933.

Gustav Holst and Cecilia Payne did meet again in 1932, when Holst conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the first of two concerts in Symphony Hall in Boston.

After the concert Holst met Mrs. Arthur Foote and Cecilia Payne, a St. Paul’s Girls’ School alumna, who was studying astronomy.⁵

This would have been Friday, January 22, 1932, during Holst’s final visit to America. The all-Holst concert was at 2:30 p.m. and featured St. Paul’s Suite; Prelude and Scherzo, “Hammersmith” (Boston premiere); and the Ballet from the Opera, The Perfect Fool (Boston premiere); followed by an intermission and then The Planets. Here is the concert program courtesy of the Internet Archive which includes pages from the previous program suggesting that a last-minute program change occurred substituting St. Paul’s Suite for Somerset Rhapsody (an excellent early work by Holst, by the way) and switching the order of Hammersmith and The Perfect Fool:

Incidentally, you might notice from the program that Arthur Fiedler was a violist in the orchestra and prepared the women’s chorus for the final movement of The Planets.

I met one ex Paulina at Harvard—Cecilia Payne who is doing research in astronomy.⁶

This is from a letter that Holst began on Tuesday, January 26, 1932 to his daughter Imogen.

He also spent some time with ex-Paulina Cecilia Payne, meeting her for lunch one day and for dinner at her place on another. This was followed by her lecture on a subject of great interest to him, the Zodiac.⁷

This was after Holst returned to Harvard from his four-day trip to Montreal and New York, and before his lecture at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., thus sometime between Tuesday, March 15 and Saturday, March 26, 1932.

Holst’s train from Ann Arbor arrived at Boston’s South Station at 11:15 a.m. on Saturday, May 21st. The next two days were spent packing and writing letters. He met with the Davisons the following morning and had dinner with Cecilia Payne at the Faculty Club that same evening.⁸

This dinner with Cecilia Payne would have been the evening of Sunday, May 22, 1932.

Later that same evening, Cecilia Payne drove Holst over to the observatory to view Jupiter and a star cluster. Holst enjoyed her company and visited with her again the day of his Boston departure.⁹

The observatory visit would have been on Tuesday, May 24. I’m guessing that the star cluster they observed after Jupiter would have been M13 in Hercules, which that evening was high in the eastern sky. Holst’s last visit with Cecilia Payne was on Thursday, May 26, 1932. Later that day, he left Boston by boat for New York where he boarded the SS Europa the following day to return to England. This was the last time Holst and Payne saw each other.

Cecilia Payne first met Russian-born astrophysicist Sergei Gaposchkin at the Astronomische Gesellschaft (Astronomical Society) meeting in Göttingen, Germany, on August 4, 1933. She helped him emigrate to the United States, and they were married on March 5, 1934. Less than three months later, Gustav Holst would be dead.

Moore, Donovan. 2020. What Stars Are Made of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. London, England: Harvard University Press, pp. 34-35. ↩︎
Moore, pp. 37-38. ↩︎
Moore, p. 38. ↩︎
Haramundanis, Katherine. 1984. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, p. 108. ↩︎
Mitchell, Jon C. 2001. A Comprehensive Biography of Composer Gustav Holst, with Correspondence and Diary Excerpts: Including His American Years. New York, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, p. 442. ↩︎
Mitchell, p. 447. ↩︎
Mitchell, p. 485. ↩︎
Mitchell, p. 543. ↩︎
Mitchell, p. 547. ↩︎

Tucson Needs Evening and Weekend Classes

Since 2023, I’ve been teaching in-person classical composer music courses in Tucson. I’ve had to do all the work myself (preparation, venue, recruitment, publicity, etc.) because none of the existing continuing education organizations in the Tucson metro area offer evening and weekend classes. Moreover, the primary organization providing continuing education courses in Greater Tucson, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute—University of Arizona (OLLI-UA) adds the additional restriction that their advertised target audience includes no one under the age of 50. Since my music courses are expressly intended for anyone interested in learning more about classical music, high-school age and older, I have had to set about on my own with no organizational support whatsoever. It has not been easy.

Anyone who has attended a symphony or chamber music concert over the last few years will notice that audiences are generally dwindling and the vast majority that do attend these concerts are folks in their 60s, 70s, or older. In my own small but determined way, I am attempting to help reverse these trends by helping folks—especially younger folks—to see that classical music can be as exciting, meaningful, and inspirational as the best of whatever other kinds of music they’ve been listening to—even more so. I am teaching the kind of music classes that I wish someone had taught me when I was a young adult. Since my interest and expertise is in building audiences for classical music, both live performances and recorded music (because, let’s face it, there is a lot of great music that most of us will never have the opportunity to hear in live performance, no matter where we live), I focus mostly on listening enjoyment and the “life and times” of each composer rather than on music theory. Even though my courses are entitled Music for Listeners, I have no doubt that professional and amateur musicians will also enjoy the meticulously-researched “deep dive” into the life and music of each composer while at the same time helping them expand their repertoire.

Attracting younger music listeners to the courses I teach requires choosing a class time that is least likely to conflict with a prospective participant’s work schedule or—in the case of students—class schedule. For the courses I teach, I have generally settled on Saturdays from 1:00 – 2:30 p.m.

Trying to reach the people in the Tucson metro area that would most benefit from my music courses has proved exceedingly difficult. So far, almost all of my students have comes from a Meetup group I started (also in 2023) and the Tucson Masterworks Chorale, where I am a member of the tenor section. Ideally, I would like to reach Classical 90.5 listeners (AZPM) and those that attend Tucson Symphony Orchestra concerts, but neither AZPM nor TSO offer public service announcements for non-profit community music events, and the cost of advertising with them is prohibitively expensive for an individual of modest means. I charge $20 per person for each music course I teach, and that covers my cost of renting the venue and little more. I want my courses to be affordable to all. Yes, it is a labor of love, but how to reach those that would most benefit from what I am doing?

I spend about half a year preparing each course that I teach, working on it each and every day (except when I am out of town which happens much less frequently than I would like). Given the enormous amount of time I invest in preparing each course, it would be a shame if I never had the opportunity to further refine and teach these courses again. At the time of this writing, I am currently teaching a course on Gustav Holst with twelve participants, and I have four other courses ready to be taught again at any time: Johannes Brahms, Sergei Prokofiev, Antonín Dvořák, and Dmitri Shostakovich. Here’s a link for an up-to-date list of past, present, and future courses that I will be teaching:

Music for Listeners – Tucson

I am sure there must be others in the Tucson metro area who would like to teach for an organization that offers evening and weekend classes and thus is inclusive of both non-retired as well as retired folks. Right now, this is one of many unmet needs we have here in Southern Arizona.

UCAC4 379-071051: A Possible New Double Star Discovery

Shadow path of UCAC4 379-071051 during its occultation by asteroid 2392 Jonathan Murray on April 18, 2025 UT

On April 18, 2025 UT, I observed an occultation of the 11.9-magnitude star (m_v) UCAC4 379-071051 in the constellation Libra by the 17.7-magnitude asteroid (m_v , at the time of observation) 2392 Jonathan Murray.

As you can see in the light curve below, I observed a two-dip event. Since the magnitude drops are unequal, that rules out an asteroid satellite.

2392 Jonathan Murray apparently covered up the brighter component of a heretofore unknown double star (either binary or optical), followed by a brief interlude before the fainter component was covered up.

The magnitude drop when the fainter star was occulted was 0.44. When the brighter star was occulted, the magnitude drop only goes down as far as the limiting magnitude of my sky in the images, which was around 14th magnitude (Tucson is not as dark as it once was). Using the magnitude drop when the fainter component was being covered by the asteroid (the only reliable magnitude drop we have), and knowing the magnitudes of the two components must sum to 11.9 magnitude, we can calculate that the magnitude of the two components are:

Primary Component (1st star occulted): 12.34

Secondary Component (2nd star occulted): 13.09

Occultation analysis expert Dave Gault (Australia) used my light curve and knowledge of the asteroid’s size and motion (and all the other factors that need to be considered) to provide the following preliminary double star solutions (there was not enough information for a single solution):

Double Star Solution #1
Separation = 36.9 mas
Position Angle = 103.6°

Double Star Solution #2
Separation = 37.0 mas
Position Angle = 113.8°

These two solutions are quite close to one another. Averaging the two separations, we get 36.95 milliarcseconds. Gaia DR3 indicates that the parallax of this star is 1.323 milliarcseconds. That’s a distance of almost 756 parsecs or 2,500 light years. At that distance, these two stars have an apparent separation (in the plane of the sky, so a minimum) of 28 AU, or a little less than the distance between the Sun and Neptune in our own solar system. This is not unreasonable for a true binary star system, but, of course, the fainter star could be many light years further away than the brighter star (which is presumably the component Gaia measured in determining the parallax). In that case, this would just be a chance alignment of two stars at different distances but not physically associated with one another.

High-resolution spectroscopic observations of UCAC4 379-071051 over time could determine whether or not this is a true binary star system. Astrometric measurements over time with whatever supercedes Gaia (likely) or analysis of occultations of this star by other asteroids (unlikely) could also determine whether or not these stars are a true binary star system.

Confounding factors in the double star solutions include (1) We don’t know the exact size of asteroid 2392 Jonathan Murray (Neowise gives a diameter of 6.5 miles); (2) We don’t yet know the shape or orientation (at event time) of this asteroid (my occultation observation was the first time this asteroid has been observed to occult a star); (3) We don’t know the orientation of my single observation chord (what part of the asteroid crossed the two stars).

As you can see, there’s a lot to consider in trying to interpret this atypical (though not all that unusual) “double dip” occultation event. Of course, the very first thing we did was to rule out any terrestrial cause of the second smaller dip (clouds, for example), and we had to also rule out any equipment anomalies that could have caused the second smaller dip (CCD anomalies, for example). After convincing ourselves that this was a real event, we proceeded with the analysis. A big thank you to Dave Gault and Dave Herald in Australia for their work and expertise in analyzing this data!

American Democracy in Crisis: Solutions

American democracy is certainly beginning to show its age and we could learn a thing or two from some of the newer democracies elsewhere in the world that have made improvements.

Here, I would like to offer what I believe are the two most important changes we can make to governance in the United States that will make government work better for all citizens and that will help reduce the polarization that is currently paralyzing our country.

#1 Publicly Financed Political Campaigns

Each accepted candidate for an elected political office should receive a designated amount of taxpayer-funded money for their campaign and not be allowed to accept donations from individuals, corporations, lobbyists, special interest groups, or any other entity. Key aspects of these publicly financed political campaigns would be

At each level of government (local, county, state, national) each candidate would need to receive an agreed-upon minimum number of nomination petition signatures in order to qualify for a run.
The amount of money each candidate receives depends on the office and the level of government, with national candidates receiving the most financial support.
There will be agreed-upon rules on how this money can be used and transparency into how it is used.
All candidates for a given political office receive the same amount of money to fund their campaigns.
Though each candidate is barred from accepting donations from other sources, they are free to take part in as many interviews and debates sponsored by other organizations as they wish.

#2 Ranked Choice Voting

Ranked Choice Voting (also known as instant runoff) allows each voter to vote for more than one candidate by selecting their first choice, second choice, and so on, if they wish. Ranked Choice Voting should be allowed at all levels of government (local, county, state, and national).

Here’s a simple example of how one method of ranked choice voting works.

Let’s say you have three candidates running for a particular political office: Candidate A, Candidate B, and Candidate C.

There are nine different ways a voter could vote in this election:

A only
B only
C only

First choice: A; Second choice: B
First choice: A; Second choice: C
First choice: B; Second choice: C
First choice: C; Second choice: B
First choice: C; Second choice: A
First choice: B; Second choice: A

Now, let’s say we have 8,764 voters who voted as follows:

A only: 182
B only: 361
C only: 880

A, then B: 718
A, then C: 1,366
B, then C: 1,336
C, then B: 1,815
C, then A: 489
B, then A: 1,617

Tallying up everyone’s first choice gives us:

Candidate A: 182 + 718 + 1,366 = 2,266 votes
Candidate B: 361 + 1,336 + 1,617 = 3,314 votes
Candidate C: 880 + 1,815 + 489 = 3,184 votes

We see that Candidate A received the fewest votes, so they are removed from further consideration. We now look at the second choice (if any) of all those who voted for Candidate A as their first choice, in addition to those who voted for Candidates B & C as their first choice.

Candidate B: 361 + 718 + 1,336 + 1,617 = 4,032 votes
Candidate C: 880 + 1,366 + 1,815 + 489 = 4,550 votes

You’ll notice the 4,032 + 4,550 = 8,582 votes, which is 182 less than the total number of voters (8,764). That’s because 182 voters voted only for Candidate A, and since they didn’t specify a second choice, when Candidate A was removed their contribution to the election is over at this point.

You’ll also notice that Candidate C wins the election with the majority of the votes (4,550 vs. 4,032).

Generalizing, if there are n candidates running then the number of ranked choices available is n-1. For example, for four candidates, there would be two rounds of elimination instead of only one as shown in the three-candidate example above.

Two candidates qualifying
Each voter chooses one and only one candidate

Three candidates qualifying
Each voter can choose a first choice and second choice candidate

Four candidates qualifying
Each voter can choose a first choice, second choice, and third choice candidate

And so on…

Ranked choice voting would encourage more than two viable political parties (and that would be a good thing, seeing as our current two-party system maximizes polarization), plus voters could vote for any candidate they truly support without fear of the spoiler effect, since they can specify a second choice should their first-choice candidate be eliminated because they received fewer votes than the other candidates.

It is unlikely that initiatives to adopt publicly financed political campaigns and ranked choice voting will come from either the Republican or Democratic parties (or their corporate and billionaire donors and lobbyists!) so it is up to us, the rank-and-file voters, to force these issues at a grassroots level. I would be interested in hearing from readers who have ideas on how best to accomplish this.

Nearest Exoplanets

There are 33 confirmed exoplanets within 15 light years of our solar system, with more certainly on the way as a number of unconfirmed exoplanets are under ongoing investigation.

Here’s a table of all known planets within 15 light years of the Sun, including the eight planets of our own solar system for comparison.

Click the link below for a more convenient view of the entire table in a separate tab.

Click to access Nearest-Exoplanets-Confirmed-Planets.pdf

Planet mass and radius are given in terms of Earth’s mass and radius. The reason the radius of all the exoplanets listed here is “unknown” is because all of these planets have been detected using the radial velocity and/or astrometric method. Only the transit method provides a reliable way to measure an exoplanet’s size, but the nearest stars that host transiting exoplanets are 21.3 ly and 22.4 ly distant (HD 219134 and LTT 1445, respectively). Our limit here is 15 ly.

A side note about transiting exoplanets. In order for us to see an exoplanet transiting its host star, the exoplanet’s orbital plane has to be fortuitously aligned quite close to our line of sight. Since even these nearest stars are very far away in comparison to the size of our solar system, we are stuck with the line of sight we have. What percentage of all exoplanets out there might we detect using the transit method? That depends, of course, on the orientation of the exoplanet’s orbital plane but also the size of the star (and the planet if it is large) and the distance of the exoplanet from that star. Roughly, only about 1 in 200 exoplanets or about 0.5% can be detected using the transit method.

Luminosity is the host star’s luminosity in terms of our Sun’s luminosity. Bolometric luminosity is used where available; otherwise, optical luminosity is used.

The average distance of the planet from the star is calculated from the semi-major axis and the orbital eccentricity. We then calculate the incident stellar flux using the average distance of the planet from the star and the luminosity of the star, normalized to what the Earth receives (0.9997 and not 1.oooo because the Earth, on average, is more than 1 AU from the Sun). The relevant equation is:

$\frac{\textrm{L}}{\bar{\textrm{d}}^{2}}\cdot\phi_{\oplus }$

where L is the luminosity of the star in terms of the Sun’s luminosity
   and d-bar is the average distance of the planet from the star in AU
   and Φ_⊕ is the incident stellar flux at Earth’s average distance from the Sun
             in proportional units of solar luminosities per AU²

This calculation, of course, makes no assumptions about the albedo of the planet nor whatever atmosphere the planet may or may not have. It is simply a calculation of stellar radiation per unit area received at the planet’s distance from the star.

Here’s an example from the table. Mercury, on average, receives 6.4 times as much energy per unit area as does the Earth, whereas Neptune receives only 0.0011 as much as the Earth.

Some Key Takeaways

The most luminous star that is known to host exoplanets within 15 light years of our solar system, Epsilon Eridani, is only 32% as bright as the Sun.
Eight of these exoplanets receive an amount of energy from their star that is comparable to what the Earth receives from the Sun: Gliese 1061 d (0.56), Proxima Centauri b (0.66), Gliese 687 b (0.78), Luyten’s Star b (1.05), Teegarden’s Star b (1.07), Wolf 1061 c (1.37), Gliese 1061 c (1.40), and Ross 128 b (1.42).
The most massive of these exoplanets is Epsilon Eridani b, weighing in at 311 earth-masses, comparable to Jupiter in our own solar system (318).

I’d like to conclude by noting that I will do my best to keep this table up-to-date, but if you see something that needs changing before I do, by all means post a comment here and I will make the correction or addition.

Kakistocracy and Trump

From the ever-impressive Oxford English Dictionary:

kakistocracy – The government of a state by the worst citizens.

The OED cites the first known use of the word kakistocracy back in 1644:
“mad kinde of Kakistocracy”

And in 1876:
“Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?”

And in 1879:
“The..régime is at once a plutocracy and a kakistocracy.”

In preparing for a course on Gustav Holst I will be teaching this summer, I recently came across a curious phrase in a letter written by Gustav’s great-uncle Theodore von Holst on October 13, 1832:

“They told us that Costa of the Opera gave a Concert there with Vigano, Tamburini, Donzelli, Grisi and other Trumps, but none of the Brightonian Nobs would patronise it…”

Again turning to the OED, I found the following:

trump – To deceive, cheat
Citations of this transitive verb are given for 1487-1631.

trump – A thing of small value, a trifle
Cited use of this noun is in 1513

trump – To give forth a trumpet-like sound; spec. to break wind audibly (slang or colloquial)
Citations of this intransitive verb are given for c. 1425 – 1845

Minor Planets Named After Their Discoverers

To the best of my knowledge, only 19 minor planets have been named after their discoverers. While the discoverer has first naming rights, they cannot name a minor planet after themselves, though they can (and sometimes do) name a minor planet after a spouse, parent, or child.

Of course, many minor planet discoverers have minor planets named after them, but almost always these are discoveries by someone else who decides to name one of “their” minor planets after the other discoverer.

In the rare situation when someone decides (and has the authority) to name a discoverer’s minor planet after the discoverer, it is almost always a posthumous honor. Comet discoveries, on the other hand, are automatically named after their discoverer(s).

I have reader Rafael to thank for letting me know that Eugène Delporte does indeed have an asteroid he discovered named after him (see comments after Eugène Delporte and the Constellation Jigsaw) and this got me wondering if there were other examples. I wrote a SAS program to do some fuzzy matching between asteroid name and asteroid discoverer, and came up with the following list. Let me know if there are any others I missed, and I will include them here.

726 Joëlla
Discovered 1911 Nov 22 by Joel Hastings Metcalf (1866-1925) at Winchester, Massachusetts.

792 Metcalfia
Discovered 1907 Mar 20 by Joel Hastings Metcalf (1866-1925) at Taunton, Massachusetts.

989 Schwassmannia
Discovered 1922 Nov 18 by Arnold Schwassmann (1870-1964) at Bergedorf, Germany.

1074 Beljawskya
Discovered 1925 Jan 26 by Sergey Ivanovich Belyavskij (1883-1953) at Simeïs, Crimea.

1111 Reinmuthia
Discovered 1927 Feb 11 by Karl Reinmuth (1892-1979) at Heidelberg, Germany.

1274 Delportia
Discovered 1932 Nov 28 by Eugène J. Delporte (1882-1955) at Uccle, Belgium.

1596 Itzigsohn
Discovered 1951 Mar 8 by Miguel Itzigsohn (1908–1978) at La Plata, Argentina.

1648 Shajna
Discovered 1935 Sep 5 by Pelageya Fedorovna Shajn (1894-1956) at Simeïs, Crimea.

1655 Comas Solá
Discovered 1929 Nov 28 by José Comas Solá (1868-1937) at Barcelona, Spain.

1666 van Gent
Discovered 1930 Jul 22 by Hendrik van Gent (1899-1947) at Johannesburg, South Africa.

1777 Gehrels
Discovered 1960 Sep 24 by C. J. van Houten, I. van Houten-Groeneveld, and Tom Gehrels (1925-2011) at Palomar Mountain, California.

1927 Suvanto
Discovered 1936 Mar 18 by Rafael Suvanto (1909-1940) at Turku, Finland.

2044 Wirt
Discovered 1950 Nov 8 by Carl A. Wirtanen (1910-1990) at Mount Hamilton, California.

2246 Bowell
Discovered 1979 Dec 14 by Edward L. G. Bowell (1943-2023) at Anderson Mesa, Arizona.

3019 Kulin
Discovered 1940 Jan 7 by György Kulin (1905-1989) at Budapest, Hungary.

5540 Smirnova
Discovered 1971 Aug 30 by Tamara Mikhajlovna Smirnova (1935-2001) at Nauchnyj, Crimea.

5900 Jensen
Discovered 1986 Oct 3 by Poul B. Jensen (?-) at Brorfelde, Denmark.

19911 Rigaux
Discovered 1933 Mar 26 by Fernand Rigaux (1905-1962) at Uccle, Belgium.

96747 Crespodasilva
Discovered 1999 Aug 16 by Lucy d’Escoffier Crespo da Silva (1978-2000) at Westford, Massachusetts.

Incidentally, here are the three most prolific minor planet discoverers that still have an unnamed minor planet discovery that could be named after them. There are, of course, many others who deserve this honor.

Eleanor F. Helin (1932-2009)
Even though 3267 Glo is named after her nickname “Glo”, why not designate one of her discoveries as Helin or Eleanor Helin or Eleanorhelin? There are many still available, beginning with 5131 (1990 BG).

Carolyn Shoemaker (1929-2021)
Though 4446 Carolyn is named after her, why not designate one of her discoveries as Carolyn Shoemaker or Carolynshoemaker? There are many still available, beginning with 48576 (1994 NN₂).

Gary Hug (1950-)
There are many still available, including 32165 (1998 FS₉₂).

Classical Music Timeline: 2020s

This is one of a series of postings of important classical music dates, from the 17th century to the present. Included are the date and location of the birth and death of composers, and the premiere date and location of the first public performance of works. When the premiere date and location is unknown, the date or year of completion of the work is given. Though reasonably comprehensive, this is a subjective list, so the choice of composers and works is mine. If you find any errors, or if you can offer a premiere date and location for a work where only the completion date or year is listed, please post a comment here.

2023
January 18 – Clytus Gottwald (1925-2023) died in Ditzingen, Germany

August 3 – Carl Davis (1936-2023) died in Oxford, England

August 19 – Gloria Coates (1933-2023) died in Munich, Germany

2024
January 16 – Peter Schickele (1935-2024) died in Bearsville, New York

←2010s

2030s→

The Mysterious Case of 55 Herculis

55 Her (near 54 Her, shown above) was visible as late as 1782, but by 1791 it had disappeared
(Click on the image above for a larger view.)

I was fascinated to read the letter from Oleksiy V. Arkhypov (Kharkiv, Ukraine) in the February 2025 issue of Sky & Telescope, p. 6, where he describes a 5th-magnitude star in the constellation Hercules that has apparently disappeared. John Flamsteed (1646-1719) had recorded the star at the end of the 17th century. Flamsteed listed the brighter stars in each constellation in order of right ascension at the time, but did not number them. That task fell to Joseph Jérôme de Lalande (1732–1807) who assigned what we now know as the “Flamsteed numbers” to each of the stars in Flamsteed’s catalogue. Two adjacent stars in Hercules in Flamsteed’s catalogue were given the designations 54 Her and 55 Her.

William Herschel (1738-1822) observed both stars on October 10, 1781 (and had noted that they were both red in color) and again on April 11, 1782, but on May 24, 1791 (and afterwards), only 54 Her was visible. Apparently, 55 Her disappeared from sight between 1782 and 1791, and it hasn’t been seen since.

In Herschel’s own words:

On the Disappearance of the 55th Herculis.

Among the changes that happen in the sidereal heavens we enumerate the loss of stars; but, notwithstanding the real destruction of an heavenly body may not be impossible, we have some reasons to think that the disappearance of a star is probably owing to causes which are of the same nature with those that act upon periodical stars, when they occasion their temporary occultations. This subject, however, being of great extent and consequence, we shall not enter into it at present, but only relate a recent instance of the kind.

Two stars of the 5th magnitude, whose places we find inserted in all our best catalogues, were to be seen in the neck of Hercules. They are the 54th and 55th of Flamsteed’s, in that constellation. In the year 1781, the 10th of October, I examined them both, and marked down their colour, red. The 11th of April, 1782, I looked at them again, and noted my having seen them distinctly, with a power of 460; and that they were single stars.

The 24th of last May, I missed one of the two, and examining the spot again the 25th, and many times afterwards, found that one of them was not to be seen. The situation of the stars is such that, not having fixed instruments, I could not well determine which of the two was the lost one. I therefore requested the favour of my much esteemed friend, the astronomer royal, to ascertain the remaining star ; and it appears from Dr. Maskelyne’s answer to my letter, that the 55th Herculis is the one which we have lost.

The coordinates for 54 Her are:
α₂₀₀₀ = 16^h 55^m 22^s, δ₂₀₀₀ = +18° 26′ 00″