The Omicron Draconds and the August Pavonids are definitely not major events. In this book, however, they are awarded separate chapters because they both have personal stories that illustrate different aspects of the adventure of meteor observing.

The August Pavonids quest began surreptitiously on the morning of June 10, 1991. Waiting for the sky to clear, and with dawn approaching, I opened the sliding roof on my observatory. As the southeastern sky began to clear slightly, I began looking for comets in the constellation of Aries. After about a minute I spotted a bright hazy spot that I quickly identified as Messier 74. This distant galaxy is one of the faintest of the Charles Messier catalog objects that he came upon, also while comet hunting, two hundred years earlier. I greeted this old friend ever so briefly, and since the night was ending I moved on. After another minute, I saw another fuzzy spot, a bit brighter than M74. Could I have stumbled on Messier 74 a second time? No: besides being brighter, its field of surrounding stars was clearly different. More important, where the galaxy M74 had moderately sharp edges, this object showed the gradual fading at the edge which is more typical of the gas and dust in a comet.