David D. Meisel (1940-2025)

The meteor astronomy community will be sad to learn that David Dering Meisel, Ph.D., Emeritus Executive Director of the American Meteor Society passed away on August 25, 2025.

David began as an amateur meteor observer. He witnessed the 1946 Draconid outburst and it was an experience that propelled him toward astronomical studies. He joined Charles P. Olivier’s American Meteor Society as an observer in the early 1950s. While he studied academic astronomy (M.S. and Ph.D. from Ohio State University, B.S. from West Virginia University) he continued to collaborate with Dr. Olivier and in 1973, David became Olivier’s successor to leadership of the AMS as its Executive Director. David shepherded the society through financially lean times until 1993, when the organization was able to become the American Meteor Society, Ltd., thanks to a generous
permanent endowment from the estate of Clinton B. Ford.

During the half century that Dr. Meisel lead the Society, he facilitated several member-originated projects. Beginning in the 1970s there were visual meteor studies that determined new radiants and monitored meteor shower activity rates; he later responded to members’ interests in radio meteor work; and in the last decade encouraged video recording of meteors with the AllSky7 camera system developed by Mike Hankey. Those video results and the public’s real time fireball reports have culminated in the Society’s current emphasis on fireball observations that are displayed on the AMS website by Operations Manager Hankey. A persistent series of severe illnesses persuaded Dr. Meisel to retire from leadership of the AMS at the end of 2023. He chose Carl Hergenrother, a NASA scientist of the OSIRIS-REx asteroid project to be his successor beginning in 2024.

From 1970-2005, Dr. Meisel was a faculty member at the State University of New York at Geneseo, Geneseo, NY. He retired from there as Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Computational Astrophysics of the Physics and Astronomy Department. Dr. Meisel’s past scientific articles included radar studies of sporadic and shower meteors and in the last four years before his death he engaged in a mathematical re-working of Charles P. Olivier’s sporadic meteor catalogs. In 2013, he co-authored a textbook, Astrophysics Through Computation with Mathematica(R) Support. During his academic career he wrote 120 publications. He was also a member of the American Astronomical Society and other scientific societies.

Richard Taibi
AMS Historian
27 August 2025

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Robert Lunsford

Bob has been interested in the stars as far back as he can recall His first experience with meteors was a biggie, the 1966 Leonid shower. In 1980, a major awaking occurred. He received a sample copy of Meteor News. He was amazed to learn there was a group actually devoted strictly to meteor observing! He joined the group also started to view some of the minor showers list among the pages of Meteor News. Lastly, he was contracted by Springer Publishing in 2007 to write a book on observing meteors. The book is now available and hopefully will be a useful guide to all interested in the enjoyable field of meteor observing.