Ronald A. McIntosh: pioneer Southern Hemisphere meteor observer

Ronald A. McIntosh: pioneer Southern Hemisphere meteor observer

The Auckland amateur astronomer Ronald A. McIntosh was New Zealand’s premier meteor researcher from the mid-1920s through the mid-1940s and was a leading authority on Southern Hemisphere meteor showers. Using his own visual observations and those contributed by other members of the Meteor Section of the New Zealand Astronomical Society (later the Royal Astronomical Society of New Zealand) McIntosh was able to write a succession of research papers and reports on various aspects of meteor astronomy. Collectively, these made an important contribution to meteor science in the days before the advent of radar investigations of meteors. In this paper we review McIntosh’s meteor astronomy publications and then summarise the launch of New Zealand radar meteor astronomy immediately after World War II.