Ray Koenig Award

This annual award is presented to a club member selected by the Centre Council for “outstanding service and advancement of amateur astronomy benefiting the members of the Kitchener-Waterloo Centre of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada”. It was named in honour of Ray Koenig, KW Centre founding member and professor of Astronomy at Wilfrid Laurier University.

In the Spring 2007 issue of the Pulsar, (available here) Alen Koebel said:

Ray had been many times the President of both the KWCentre and its predecessor, the Grand Valley Astronomers (GVA), the club that became the 19th Centre of the RASC in1980. Ray can rightly be considered one of the founders of the K-W Centre, since it was largely his arguments for the benefits of membership that lead to the GVA’s transformation into a RASC Centre.... Construction of the club’s observatory near Ayr, which started in 1974, also occurred under Ray’s leadership.

During his years in the club, Ray was an avid astrophotographer. As far back as the early ’70s, long before personal computers, CCDs, or digital cameras, Ray was taking outstanding celestial photographs on colour film, a challenging undertaking at best.

Ray passed away in April 2007, at age 76.
The KW Centre renamed a dormant award, the Eric Peterson Award, in 2009, to honour Ray.

History of the Award

Year	Recipient
2010	Sergio Mammoliti
2011	Brian Hollander
2012	Dave Garner
2013	Clark Muir
2014	Steve Holmes
2018	Rhett Mackend