The fairly recent 65th anniversary of the start of the IGY, and my failed commemoration

July 1, 2022 was the 65th anniversary of the beginning of the IGY on that date in 1957. This was noted in a nice article by  Lauren Lipuma for the National Science Foundation website, wherein she mentions some of the major accomplishments of the IGY. Plus, she included some images of IGY stamps!

I tried to create my own 65th anniversary philatelic cover, but it didn't work out. I wanted to create and send a cover addressed to myself, with sufficient postage including the 1958 3¢ U.S. IGY stamp (Scott 1107) and another IGY-themed stamp, and a cachet I designed myself to mark the event. Then my plan was to get the cover canceled and postmarked in Adamstown, PA (Adam's town), just 45 minutes from Lancaster, since the image on the IGY stamp includes Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam. Unfortunately, I waited until the last minute and could not find a printer that I could do this on.

The design looked like this, without the stamps:

For the postage I would have added one of the 2021 Forever solar activity stamps to the 1958 IGY stamp itself:

I will be trying to make such a cover for another IGY anniversary. Any suggestions?

A new Mellone first day cover cachet for my IGY collection

I may be forgotten, but not quite gone.

In a previous post, I mentioned that the specialized Mellone catalogs of cachets on first day covers listed a number of known cachets for U.S. IGY first day covers. The Mellone catalog listed 31 such covers for the U.S. IGY stamp. For a long time, years I think, I have had 25 of these. I recently acquired my 26th (coincidentally also cover #26 in the Mellone listings)! But the majority of IGY covers in my collection were not listed by Mellone. I was pretty excited to find this cover on eBay, and the price was quite favorable.

US242 in my IGY cover collection; Mellone #26 for stamp Scott 1107

Note that in the sidebar of this blog, showing a historic event that happened on or about this day during the IGY (www.eventshistory.com/), I listed that on today's date, 21 August, the Soviet Union in 1957 successfully conducted a long-range test flight of the R-7 Semyorka, the first intercontinental ballistic missile. According to Wikipedia, a modified version of that missile carried Sputnik 1 into orbit on 4 October 1957 and Sputnik 2 on 3 November 1957.