Mid-Winter Savings Now In Effect! 
At last — an efficient 
woodstove beautiful enough 
for your home 
The WESO Ceramic TUe Stove enhances the 
beauty of the most tastefully decorated home, where 
a black metal heater would be rudely out of place. 
You can see the flames flickering behind the 
wrought-iron style grille as the WESO — which 
employs both convection and radiant heat — sur- 
rounds you with gentle all-over warmth 
The WESO bums both wood and coal, holds a fire 
all night without tending, and offers every efficiency 
feature you could ask for. Now available in your 
choice of seven decorator tile colors. 
Enclosed is $1 Rush me your literature showing the 
WESO CERAMIC TILE STOVE in all 7 tile colors — plus 
details about WESO's new COALBURNING STOVE — 
and shipping schedule for winter delivery 
Name 
Address 
Zip 
Ceramic Radiant Heat 
2913 Pleasant Drive, Lockmere. N.H. 03252 
r B00K HUNTING K 
Virtually any book located — no matter how 
old or tong out-of-print. Fiction, nonfiction. 
All authors, subject*. Name the book — we'll 
find Itl (Title alone I* sufficient) Inquire, 
please. Write: Dept. 71 
BOOKS-ON-FILE P.O. BOX 195 
V. UNION CITY, NEW JERSEY 07087 J 
international 
nature tours 
Galapagos Islands/ 
Headwaters of the 
Amazon/Ecuador/ 
Peru/Patagonia/ 
Falkland Is./Kenya 
Tanzania/Rwanda 
Gorilla Safari/ Costa 
Rica/Nepal/New 
Guinea 
Expert Naturalist Guides 
Very Small Croups 
Write WILDERNESS TRAVEL* 
1760-NJ Solano Ave., Berkeley, CA 94707 
(415) 524-5111 
v "formerly So. American Wilde men Adventures 
nomenon that astronomers call a me- 
teor train, consisted of material shed 
as the meteoroid was heated by fric- 
tion with the air. In addition, the math- 
ematics of the deceleration method 
were established for typical meteor- 
oids, which fall along fairly steep 
paths, rather than for an object such 
as the August 1972 meteoroid, with 
a grazing trajectory like that of a stone 
thrown to skip off water. 
In view of the foregoing, it is hardly 
surprising that published estimates of 
the mass of the August 1972 mete- 
oroid have ranged all the way from 
two tons to one million tons. Recently, 
however, a new analysis has given us 
what is probably the most reliable 
available information. 
The new study is by Zdenek Cep- 
lecha, an authority on meteor obser- 
vations at the Astronomical Institute 
of the Czechoslovakian Academy of 
Sciences. He analyzed the full list of 
satellite measurements, which has 
never been published, and developed 
an improved deceleration method that 
allows for both the grazing trajectory 
and the frictional shedding of matter 
by the August 1972 meteoroid. By 
internal cross-checking, Ceplecha de- 
termined that the errors that affected 
the original list of measurements in 
Nature had been eliminated. There 
is still no way to get around the un- 
known density of the meteoroid, even 
by means of the improved deceleration 
method, but it seems likely that the 
meteoroid is a stone of 100 to 1,000 
tons, with a diameter of twelve to 
thirty feet. 
The most interesting aspect of 
Ceplecha’s work, for me, is his cal- 
culation of the future orbit of the Au- 
gust 1972 meteoroid. The object no 
longer follows its original path, having 
been disturbed by its 1972 encounter 
with the earth. Instead, it now revolves 
around the sun approximately once 
every 211/2 months, following an elon- 
gated elliptical orbit that brings it out 
into the asteroid belt, far beyond 
Mars, and then back toward the sun, 
reaching almost six million miles in- 
side the earth’s orbit. The orbits of 
the meteoroid and the earth cross at 
one point in space, but thankfully both 
objects do not usually pass this place 
at the same time. They won’t even 
come close until August 1997, when 
the meteoroid will have completed 
fourteen orbital revolutions since it 
zoomed past Idaho at an altitude of 
less than thirty-six miles in 1972. 
In. 1997, the meteoroid is expected 
Joseph L. Sax 
Mountains 
Without 
Handrails 
Reflections on the National Parks 
Sax proposes a novel scheme for the 
protection and management of America's 
national parks, giving perspective to the 
longstanding and hitter battles over use of 
our national parklands: hikers vs. cyclists; 
ski resort developers vs. wilderness 
advocates; "industrial tourism" vs. 
recreational “elitism.” 
$10.00 / paper $5.95 
The University of Michigan Press 
Dept.OM P.O. Box 1104 
Ann Arbor, MI 48106 
Treasures From 
The Earth I 
Color Portfolio of Natural 
Specimens and Catalog 
of Minerals, Display 
Stands. Books and 
Natural Jewelry, $3.00 
Dover Scientific 
Box 601 1 C Long Island City. NY 1 1106 
BUSHNELL 7x35 CUSTOM 
Mfg. List $280.00 Postpaid $164.00 
This is an example of the deep discount prices on high quality 
optics that is found in our FREE catalog This catalog lists 
and illustrates an outstanding selection or telescopes, binoc- 
ulars etc , plus valuable information on how to properly select 
them. Write for it today 
GIL HEBARD OPTICS 
COURTHOUSE SQ., KNOXVILLE, ILL. 61448 
102 
