Walter Scott Houston

Lore & Background

Houston was born in Tippecanoe, Wisconsin, in 1912 and attended the University of Wisconsin, earning a degree in English. He taught at universities and public schools in several states and during World War II served as an instructor at the Advanced Navigation School for Army-Air Force pilots at Selman Field in Louisiana. In 1960 he moved to Connecticut to become an editor for American Education Publications, remaining there until his retirement in 1974.

As a boy, Houston learned to build microscopes and telescopes and soon observed all 103 nebulae and star clusters in the Messier catalog. While at university he began observing variable stars and joined the American Association of Variable Star Observers in 1931, eventually contributing more than 12,000 observations. In the 1950s in Kansas, he undertook radio monitoring of meteor activity, operating the first automated data collection system designed by amateurs for continuous, long-term meteor event data collection.

In 1955, Houston recruited satellite spotters for Operation Moonwatch, and in 1958 his station in Manhattan, Kansas, was the first to sight Explorer I, the United States' first satellite. He raised funds through talks, leading the president of Kansas State University to include his team in the annual science research summary and the Physics Department to donate equipment. In 1959, he perpetrated an April Fool's hoax about the moons of Mars being artificial satellites, which gained worldwide attention after Soviet scientist Iosif Shklovsky proposed a similar theory.

Reader's Guide

Houston's most enduring legacy is the "Deep-Sky Wonders" column, which he wrote for Sky and Telescope from 1946 until his death in 1993, with the final column appearing in 1994. This column popularized the observing of deep-sky objects among amateur astronomers. He also published a regional newsletter, The Great Plains Observer, circulated to several thousand amateurs. His technical contributions include pioneering the first automated data collection system for meteor event monitoring, a method that forms the basis for most forward scatter automated detection systems used today. His Moonwatch station's early detection of Explorer I demonstrated the value of amateur satellite tracking. The main-belt asteroid 3031 Houston, discovered in 1984, was named in his honor, and the Walter Scott Houston Award of the North East Region Astronomical League was also named after him. In 1974 he received the Astronomical League Award at the National A.L. Meeting in East Lansing, Michigan, where he was the main speaker.

Did You Know?

• In 1959 he perpetrated an April Fool's hoax claiming the moons of Mars were artificial satellites.
• The asteroid 3031 Houston was named in his honor.