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Charles Reid has long been considered a master of the medium of watercolor. His paintings are fresh and spontaneous, displaying his profound understanding of light and color and expert drawing ability. The viewer is immediately drawn into his rich compositions. His figures are beautifully rendered, in a simple, direct and natural, gestural manner that reveals his interest in painting the light as much as the person.

Reid was born in Cambridge, New York, and studied art at the University of Vermont and the Art Students League of New York. He has won numerous awards, including the Childe Hassam Purchase Prize at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Academy of Design and the American Watercolor Society. In 1980 he was elected to the National Academy of Design. Public collections of his work include Smith College, Yellowstone Art Center, Brigham Young College, Roche Corporation, and the National Academy of Design. In addition to painting, Reid teaches workshops around the world. He has written eleven books on painting in watercolor and oil. Recent awards include a Purchase Award from Shanghai International Biennial Exhibition in 2013 and a Gold Medal from the Portrait Society of America in 2013.

The minor meteor shower, with a radiant not far from its eponymous star Kappa Cygni, peaks in mid-August, almost at the same time as the much better-known and better-observed Perseid meteor shower. But, seen to have a peak rate of only about 3 meteors per hour, Kappa Cygnids are vastly outnumbered by the more popular, prolific Perseid shower's meteors that emanate from the heroic constellation Perseus. To capture dozens of Kappa Cygnids, this long term astro-imaging project compiled meteors in exposures selected from over 51 August nights during the years 2012 through 2024. Most of the exposures with identified Kappa Cygnid meteors were made in August 2021, a high point of the shower's known 7-year activity cycle. All twelve years worth of Kappa Cygnids are registered against a base sea and night skyscape of the Milky Way above Elafonisi Beach, Crete, Greece, also recorded in August of 2021..