When you read this, I will be in the United States, either celebrating the arrival of the New Year in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, or participating in the 215^th conference of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC.

I have never been to an AAS meeting before, and as they represent major events on the astronomical calendar, this will be an exciting experience. I will give an invited talk in the Historical Astronomy Division of the AAS, on the theme of the first hundred years of astronomical spectroscopy.

For some years now I have had a love affair with Thailand. My connection with the country began in 1980 when a young Thai student came to New Zealand to study for an MSc in astronomy. He was Boonrucksar Soonthornthum, currently the director of the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand.

Sir Ernest Marsden FRS is recognized as one of New Zealand’s greatest scientists. He was born in Lancashire, UK in 1889 and studied at the University of Manchester where he worked for a time under Ernest Rutherford. It is here he undertook with Hans Geiger the famous alpha particle scattering experiment from gold foil (in 1909) under Rutherford’s supervision. This is the experiment that was seminal in Rutherford’s discovery of the atomic nucleus.

One of the most famous astronomers to graduate from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand has undoubtedly been Beatrice Tinsley (née Hill). Beatrice was born in England in 1941 and with her parents and two sisters, Rowena and Theodora, she migrated to New Zealand in 1946.

A famous old telescope has spent nearly half a century in New Zealand while awaiting a new home. There is now a good chance that a new life for the 18-inch (45-cm) Brashear refractor will be found.

The telescope has an illustrious history. It was installed in 1897 at the Flower Observatory in Pennsylvania, which was owned by the University of Pennsylvania. The mechanical construction took place in 1895-96 at the Warner and Swasey Co. in Cleveland Ohio. The optics were figured by John Brashear (1840-1920) in Pittsburgh. He was the famous American optical engineer and the equal of Alvan Clark. Together Clark and Brashear built some of the largest refractors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.