Horace Smith hosts a Variable Star Meeting at MSU

Saturday morning I made the 90 minute drive to Michigan State University to participate in a meeting on variable stars, hosted by Dr. Horace Smith. I arrived plenty early and got to chat informally with Horace and one of his graduate students, Charles Kuehn.The MSU campus is beautiful in spring, summer and fall. Unfortunately, this trip was in March, part of that ugly, maddening season which should be called late winter. We have six seasons here in Michigan: spring (approximately one week), summer, fall (the best season), early winter, mid-winter and late winter (November - April). All things considered it was a nice day. I wore a sport coat and turtleneck; that was enough for the walk from the parking structure to the Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building.Horace Smith is a bit of a legend in variable star astronomy. He wrote "the book" on RR Lyrae variables, a subject of which I am embarrassingly uninformed. He was friendly and gracious, and put me at ease right away. He's basically a big teddy bear of a man, with a wizened gray beard, a perfect smile and a pleasing gravelly voice. I liked him immediately.Once everyone arrived, Horace greeted us all and ...