10/06/2026
Archive update: boxes for the boxes
We've sorted the collection into four or five main groups. The largest by far is the raw data — tens of thousands of observation sheets and star charts, many with a hand-drawn line tracing the path of a meteor someone watched a century ago.
The old boxes did their job, but their time is up. They aren't archival. They're worn, and they carry a faint smell of mildew. Nothing inside is in folders. Nothing is sorted. Our job is to move every sheet into acid-free folders, and the folders into archival boxes.
While we waited for supplies, I moved the data boxes onto shelves and arranged them by decade. Yesterday the supplies arrived — a full pallet of them — and the transfer began. I got through two boxes from the 1910s. It took a couple of hours, and I barely looked at anything. Mostly I was lifting inch-thick stacks of paper and settling them into folders. We'll pass through this material many more times, refining the order and pulling fireball data out of the logs.
Olivier extracted and published much of that data himself, and we already hold about 200 historic AMS events. But fireball reports hide nearly everywhere — in letters, on observation charts, on the cards. Our intern Joan is making steady progress on the fireball cards, sorting their contents into boxes of their own. Hundreds of those events were copied onto cards from old academic records. The oldest describes a fireball seen in 32 B.C.
Mike Hankey
AMS Operations Manager
