scientists

Charles A. Young (1834–1908)

kolinski — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 17:06:58 +0000

Charles A. Young (1834–1908) kolinski Fri, 01/14/2022 - 10:06

Charles Augustus Young was born at Hanover, New Hampshire, on December 15, 1834. Both his father and grandfather had been Professors of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Dartmouth College, where Young entered in 1849 at age fourteen and graduated from in 1853 at the head of his class. Young first contemplated missionary work, but in 1856 accepted a position at Western Reserve College (Ohio) as professor of Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Astronomy. In 1866 he took the position at Dartmouth College held by his father until the latter's death. In 1877 he became Professor of Astronomy at Princeton University, where he spent the rest of his professional career.

Portrait of Charles A. Young.

Wikipedia

Young was a pioneer in many fields of solar physics and astrophysics. In 1870 he captured the first photograph of a solar prominence. In 1873 he became the first to successfully use a diffraction grating for astronomical purposes, which he used in 1876 for one of the earliest measurements of the sun's rotation via the Doppler shift of spectral lines. Heading eclipse expeditions around the world and at high mountain altitudes, Young broke new ground in his spectroscopic studies of the solar outer atmosphere. One of his most far-reaching spectroscopic achievements occurred at the 1870 eclipse in Spain, where he discovered the reversing layer in the Sun's chromosphere. The existence of this layer was hotly contested at the time, especially by the British solar spectroscopist Joseph Norman Lockyer. In 1869, working in collaboration with William Harkness, he discovered a green line in the coronal spectrum, without any known counterpart in laboratory spectra. This led the two researchers to propose the existence of a new chemical element hitherto unknown on Earth, which they named "Coronium." It took over 60 years for solar physicists to finally realize that the green line belonged to a highly ionized state of Iron, and indicative of the million-degree high temperature of the solar corona.

Young was a highly appreciated and respected teacher at both Dartmouth and Princeton, and an extremely active public speaker on matters of science and astronomy. He published numerous textbooks, including, in 1881, one of the best solar physics textbooks of the period, entitled simply "The Sun," which saw many subsequent editions and translations well into the twentieth century. His very popular 1902 "Manual of Astronomy", an intermediate level textbook, also underwent numerous reprints, including a 1926 edition revised by Henry Norris Russell.

Young was awarded numerous honorary degrees and prizes in the course of his career, including the Janssen Medal of the French Academy of Sciences (1891) for his work in solar spectroscopy. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, of the American Philosophical Society, and an associate member of the British Royal Astronomical Society. In declining health, Young retired from Princeton in 1905 and moved back to his native Hanover, where he died on January 3, 1908.

Bibliography

Poor, J.M. 1908, Popular Astronomy, 16(4), p. 218.

Porter, R. (ed.) 1994, The Biographical Dictionary of Scientists, Oxford University Press.

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1834

William Hyde Wollaston (1766–1828)

kolinski — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 16:27:48 +0000

William Hyde Wollaston (1766–1828) kolinski Fri, 01/14/2022 - 09:27

William Hyde Wollaston was born on August 6, 1766 in Norfolk, UK. He obtained a doctorate in medicine from Cambridge in 1793. While practicing medicine for many years, he also became interested in chemistry, physics, crystallography and metallurgy, to which he devoted himself fully from 1800 onward.

Painting of William Hyde Wollaston.

Wikipedia

In the early 1800's he developed a physico-chemical method for the processing of Platinum ore, which made him a wealthy man and led him to the discovery of the chemical elements Palladium (1803) and Rhodium (1804). He invented various optical instruments for the measurement of angles between crystal planes, of the refraction index of transparent solids, and to aid in accurate microscopic observations. In the last years of his life he carried out electrical experiments paving the way to the design of the electric motor. He became involved in a priority controversy with his fellow countryman Michael Faraday (1791–1867), who was undoubtedly the first to produce a workable electrical motor design, and remained reluctant to grant Wollaston credit for his earlier work.

Wollaston's claim to astronomical fame rests on his observations of dark lines in the solar spectrum. He noticed these while carrying out optical experiments aimed at determining refractive indices of various transparent substances, but did not attach great importance to this discovery, leaving it to Joseph von Fraunhofer to rediscover and study them in great detail fifteen years later.

Wollaston was widely considered as one of the leading scientists of his time. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1793 and served as its Secretary from 1804 to 1816. He died in London on December 22, 1828.

Bibliography

Porter, R. (ed.) 1994, The Biographical Dictionary of Scientists, Oxford University Press.

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1766

Rudolf Wolf (1816–1893)

kolinski — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 15:31:14 +0000

Rudolf Wolf (1816–1893) kolinski Fri, 01/14/2022 - 08:31

Rudolf Wolf was born on July 7, 1816 in Fällanden, near Zürich. He studied astronomy in Zürich, Vienna and Berlin, and upon graduating moved to Bern to teach mathematics and physics. He was appointed director of the small astronomical observatory in Bern in 1847. In 1855 he moved back to Zürich, where he was appointed Professor of Astronomy at the University and at Polytechnic school (now the ETH), where he later became Director of the Observatory.

Portrait of Rudolf Wolf.

Wikipedia

Wolf's interest in sunspots was inspired by his observation of a particularly large and spectacular sunspot group in December of 1847. He began his own telescopic observations and records of sunspots, which he carried out continuously for the following 46 years. Much impressed with Samuel Schwabe's discovery of the sunspot cycle, he embarked on a program of historical studies aimed at reconstructing the variation in the number of sunspots as far back in the past as possible, based on surviving notebooks and drawings of long gone astronomers. During this program Wolf defined his now famous relative sunspot number. By 1868, Wolf had a reliable sunspot number reconstruction back to 1745. He then pushed his reconstruction all the way back to 1610, although the paucity of data effectively rendered these older determinations far less reliable. Wolf was the first to note the possible existence in the sunspot record of a longer modulation period of about 55 years.

By 1852 Wolf was one of four people to independently and simultaneously notice the coincidence between the 11 year sunspot cycle and the cycle of geomagnetic activity. Wolf and others also noted a similar correspondence between sunspot cycle and frequency of auroral activity. Wolf sought a similar periodicity in various meteorological phenomena, but without conclusive results.

Wolf was a broad and prolific author. His "Mathematics, Physics, Geodesy, and Astronomy" saw six editions between 1852 and 1893. His "History of Recent Astronomy" and "Handbuch der Astronomie" were both extremely popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He contributed to the "Biographies of Swiss Men of Science" and the "Handbuch der Mathematik." Wolf reported the results of his historical research on sunspots in his "Astronomische Mittheilungen," a private research journal which appeared in 13 volumes between 1852 and 1893, and of which Wolf was the sole author. His sunspot number monitoring work continued at the Zürich Observatory until 1979, when it was transferred to Brussels. The Wolf sunspot number, as it is now called, remains the favored historical indicator of past solar activity.

Bibliography

Hoyt, D.V., and Schatten, K.H. 1997, The Role of the Sunin Climate Change, Oxford University Press.

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1816

Hermann Carl Vogel (1841–1907)

kolinski — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 22:56:24 +0000

Hermann Carl Vogel (1841–1907) kolinski Thu, 01/13/2022 - 15:56

Hermann Carl Vogel was born in Leipzig on April 3, 1841. He first studied at the Polytechnical school in Dresden, and then returned to Leipzig to study natural sciences at the University, where he became assistant at the Observatory.

Portrait of Hermann Carl Vogel.

Wikipedia

Increasingly interested in astronomy, he became director of the Bothkamp Observatory (near Kiel) in 1870 and joined the Potsdam Astrophysical Observatory (near Berlin) in 1879, of which he became director in 1882, a position he held until his death on August 13, 1907. In the course of his career he was elected to most of the largest scientific academies and societies of Europe and America.

Vogel was a pioneer in the use of astronomical spectroscopy and photography. He measured the solar rotation and showed that the solar photosphere shared the rotational motion inferred from sunspots observations. He also carried out some of the first spectroscopic studies of other planets in the solar system. Making use of photography in spectroscopic studies, he was among the first astronomers to measure the radial velocities of bright stars, and to attempt the classification of stars on the basis of their spectra. His spectrophotographic studies of the stars Algol and Spica led him to the discovery of spectroscopic binaries, double-star systems that are too close for the individual stars to be seen by a telescope, and allowed him to estimate some of their orbital parameters of these binary systems.

Bibliography

Abbott, D. (ed.) 1984, The Biographical Dictionary of Scientists: Astronomers, London: Blond Educational.

Herrmann, D.B. 1973, Geschichte der Astronomie von Herschel bis Hertzsprung (trans. K. Krisciunas, The History of Astronomy from Herschel to Hertzspring, Cambridge University Press, 1984).

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1841

Natalia Nikolayevna Stepanian (1931–2018)

kolinski — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 22:30:30 +0000

Natalia Nikolayevna Stepanian (1931–2018) kolinski Thu, 01/13/2022 - 15:30

This article is re-worked from an obituary posted on the IAU website.

Natalia Nikolayevna Stepanian.

Born in Moscow, Natalia Nikolayevna Stepanian enrolled in graduate school in 1949 at Lomonosov Moscow State University. In 1954 she began her postgraduate work at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory (CrAO). Later, Natalia was promoted from junior researcher to the Laboratory head. Her graduate thesis was defended in 1963 on the topic of metal lines and rare earth flares, and in 1984, her Doctoral thesis was a study of the evolution of solar activity and its prediction.

Natalia has been a member of the International Astronomical Union since 2006, and was awarded Professor, Honored Scientist of the Republic of Crimea in 2009. She has published upwards of 240 research papers and two well received books. Natalie helped create an instrument base for solar observations. She was involved in mounting the Tower Solar Telescope BST-1 and was first in its use for spectral observations. Her contributions were invaluable in the construction of the horizontal, second tower telescope and two versions of an air-based telescope for operative prediction of flares under bad weather conditions.

The International Astronomical Union describes her research expertise in their obituary notice:

"N.N. Stepanian studied behavior of the magnetic field in the solar atmosphere during flares based on field measurements in lines produced at various heights. She elaborated multi-parameter methods for predicting the evolution of active regions, which were particularly applied in operative predictions of solar activity during the flights of cosmonauts. N.N. Stepanian paid considerable attention to the organization of the Solar Service in CrAO. In the last years she was interested in problems of the evolution of large-scale structures: coronal holes, background magnetic field structures and their relation with the solar activity."

Natalia Nikolayevna Stepanian lived until age 87 and was the oldest researcher at the CrAO when she died in 2018 following a long illness.

Bibliography

The International Astronomical Union, Obituary notice.

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1931

Gustav Spörer (1822–1895)

kolinski — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 22:17:32 +0000

Gustav Spörer (1822–1895) kolinski Thu, 01/13/2022 - 15:17

Portrait of Gustav Spörer.

Wikipedia

Gustav Spörer was born in Berlin on October 23, 1822. Between 1840 and 1843 he studied mathematics and astronomy at the University of Berlin. He started his professional career as a school teacher and only began his solar observations at age 36, with very modest equipment.

Spörer shares credit with the Englishman R. C. Carrington for independent and nearly simultaneous discoveries of two solar features of great importance. By the early 1860s, both astronomers had accumulated sunspot observations demonstrating:

The differential rotation of the Sun's surface, as inferred from the apparent east to west motion of sunspots, and
The gradual equatorward drift of sunspots in the course of the sunspot cycle (now often called Spörer's Law).

With his reputation now established, Spörer was invited to join the Potsdam Astrophysical Observatory in 1874, then still under construction, where he became chief observer in 1882. At Potsdam, he continued his solar observing program and became engaged in historical research into 17th century sunspot observations. By 1887 Spörer had convinced himself that the Sun was behaving unusually in the 17th century, with very few sunspots present on its surface. Through careful analyses of surviving 17th century observational material, he compiled a list of the few sunspots observed during that time period. Surprisingly, this groundbreaking work attracted relatively little attention until it was publicized by E. W. Maunder as part of his own historical studies of 17th century sunspot observations.

Spörer retired from Potsdam in 1894. Despite having enjoyed perfect health throughout his life, he died suddenly on July 7, 1895.

Bibliography

Porter, R. (ed.) 1994, The Biographical Dictionary of Scientists, Oxford University Press.

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1822

Charlotte Moore Sitterly (1898–1990)

kolinski — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 22:06:24 +0000

Charlotte Moore Sitterly (1898–1990) kolinski Thu, 01/13/2022 - 15:06

Charlotte Moore Sitterly was an American born astronomer known for her substantial spectroscopic research of the sun and chemical elements. Her data tables, known for their reliability, are still relevant today and referenced regularly.

Charlotte Moore Sitterly, 1961.

Sitterly was raised a Quaker and was a lifelong member of the Fallowfields Friends Meeting. While attending Swarthmore College for mathematics, Sitterly also was active in ice hockey, student government, and glee club. To help pay her tuition, she tutored young students from first grade to high school. This tutoring experience caused her to realize that as a profession teaching was "too wearing."

Once she graduated from Swarthmore in 1920 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics, Sitterly started working at Princeton University Observatory as a “human computer.” She worked for and collaborated with Henry Norris Russel running calculations for adjusting photographic plates used to determine the Moon's position. Sitterly's work at Princeton stimulated her interest in astrophysics, specifically, a fascination with binary stars and stellar mass (resulting in extensive collaborative publications). She also made an effort to classify 2500 stars based on their spectra.

Five years later and in partnership with Princeton University, she moved to Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles. At Mt. Wilson, she concentrated on solar spectroscopy, including the study of the Sun's spectral lines and chemical elements. She was instrumental in redetermining the new International Angstrom scale. Charlotte earned her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1931—unable to attend Princeton because women PhD students were not allowed and would not be for the next 30 years. After receiving her PhD she returned to Princeton to continue work with Russell as a research assistant.

In 1945, Moore joined the National Bureau of Standards, researching infrared solar spectrum and atomic energy levels. She worked with astronomer Richard Tousey using V-2 rockets to improve observing capability by eliminating interference from the earth's atmosphere.

In 1937 Moore married Bancroft Sitterly, a physicist she met while working at Princeton. In 1949 she was elected an associate of the Royal Astronomical Society of Great Britain. In 1958 Sitterly took part in the tenth general assembly of the International Astronomical Union on the Joint Commission on Spectroscopy in Moscow. She was 70 when she retired from NBS in 1968, but continued her research at the Naval Research Laboratory. Sitterly authored and co-authored over 100 publications. In 1988 she was recognized by the Journal of the Optical Society of America with an honorable-commemorative issue.

Bibliography

Wikipedia, Charlotte Moore Sitterly.

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1898

Carolyn Jean Spellmann Shoemaker (1929–2021)

kolinski — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 21:49:25 +0000

Carolyn Jean Spellmann Shoemaker (1929–2021) kolinski Thu, 01/13/2022 - 14:49

Carolyn Jean Spellmann Shoemaker was a well known female astronomer. She was a co-discoverer of the Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 and was credited with identifying 39 comets during her lifetime, a greater number than any other individual at that time.

Caroloyn Shoemaker

Born in Gallup, New Mexico, Shoemaker grew up in Chico, California and earned degrees in history, political science, and English literature at Chico State University. Shoemaker was not interested in science until she met Gene Shoemaker, the best man at her brother's wedding in 1950. She and Gene exchanged letters and, after graduating, she moved to New Jersey to join Gene who was doing a doctoral degree in Geology at Princeton University. They were married on August 18, 1951.

Following her marriage, Shoemaker took her first job teaching 7th grade students. Unsatisfied with teaching, she quit to raise her family. She and Gene had three children and settled in Flagstaff, Arizona, in the 1960s.

During their marriage Carolyn developed a deep fascination for science from listening to her husband Gene explaining geology. Once her children were grown, she began studying astronomy from a student at Lowell Observatory at the urging of her husband, who had pioneered the application of geologic principles to the mapping of planets, and served as the first director of the United States Geological Survey's Astrogeology Research Program. Carolyn became her husband's field assistant and together they began mapping and analyzing impact craters.

According to Wikipedia, "Carolyn Shoemaker started her astronomical career in 1980, at age 51, searching for Earth-crossing asteroids and comets at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California and the Palomar Observatory in San Diego, California. That year, Shoemaker was hired at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) as a visiting scientist in the astronomy branch, and then in 1989 began work as an astronomy research professor at Northern Arizona University. She concentrated her work on searching for comets and planet-crossing asteroids. Teamed with astronomer David H. Levy, the Shoemakers identified Shoemaker-Levy 9, a fragmented comet with an orbit that intersected that of Jupiter, on March 24, 1993."

Honors and awards

Hildian asteroid was named 4446 Carolyn (1985)
Rittenhouse Medal of the Rittenhouse Astronomical Society (1988)
Scientist of the year (1995)
Honorary doctorate degree (1996)—Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ
Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (1996)—U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration
James Craig Watson Medal (1998)—U.S. National Academy

Bibliography

Wikipedia, Carolyn Jean Spellmann Shoemaker.

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1929

Angelo Secchi (1818–1878)

kolinski — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 21:32:27 +0000

Angelo Secchi (1818–1878) kolinski Thu, 01/13/2022 - 14:32

Angelo Secchi was born on June 18, 1818 in Reggio, Italy. He joined the Jesuit order at age 15, began his theological studies in 1844, and was ordained priest in 1847. In 1839 he began lecturing on physics and mathematics at the Jesuits' Collegio Romano.

Portrait of Angelo Secchi.

Wikipedia

In 1848, due to the political unrest in Italy that led to the general expulsion of the Jesuit order, he traveled to England, then to Georgetown University, near Washington, where he taught the natural sciences. He was back in Europe within a year, and in 1852 returned to Rome, founding a new observatory at the Collegio Romano. He remained based in Rome until his death, on 26 February 1878.

Secchi made many important contributions to the astronomy of his days, in particular on stellar spectral classification. He was the first to make systematic use of spectroscopy in stellar classification. His four class scheme prevailed throughout much of the second half of the nineteenth century, and paved the way for all later classification schemes. Secchi was also extremely active in solar physics, an area he became interested in during his stay in America. He studied prominences during eclipses, both visually and spectroscopically, and provided the first demonstrations that prominences are features belonging to the Sun. He wrote a number of astronomical books in Italian, some quite technical, others aimed at the general public, and one for children. His influential solar monograph "Le Soleil" was first published in Paris in 1870, with a German translation appearing in 1872 and the second French edition in 1875.

Secchi was the first astrophysicist to suggest that the solar core is in a gaseous state, with the temperature steadily decreasing from the center to the surface. Some of his theories on sunspots, granulation and prominences would today be considered obsolete, but their influence on nineteenth century astronomy and solar physics was considerable. He was elected to England's Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society of the French Académie des Sciences, and of Russia's Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg. In Italy he presided for many years over the Accademia dei Nuovi Lincei, and founded the Societa degli Spettroscopisti Italiani, devoted to spectroscopic studies of the Sun.

He remained based in Rome until his death on February 26, 1878.

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1818

Samuel Heinrich Schwabe (1789–1875)

kolinski — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 20:40:49 +0000

Samuel Heinrich Schwabe (1789–1875) kolinski Thu, 01/13/2022 - 13:40

Drawing of S. Heinrich Schwabe.

Wikipedia

Samuel Heinrich Schwabe was born on October 25, 1789 in Dessau, near Berlin. He began pharmaceutical studies in Berlin, in the course of which he became interested in astronomy and botany. He returned to Dessau in 1812 to take over his family's pharmacy, while pursuing astronomical and botanical researches as an amateur. His first telescope was won at a lottery in 1825, but the following year he ordered a more powerful one through Joseph Fraunhofer. Becoming increasingly absorbed in his astronomical studies, he sold the family business in 1829.

Schwabe's observational work was aimed originally at discovering possible planets inside the orbit of Mercury. Starting on October 11, 1825, he observed the Sun virtually every day that the weather allowed and did so continuously for 42 years. He accumulated volumes of sunspot drawings, with the aim of detecting his hypothetical planet as it passed across the solar disk while avoiding confusion with small sunspots. In 1843 Schwabe still had not discovered any new planets, but instead, his 17 years of nearly continuous sunspot observations revealed a 10-year periodicity in the number of sunspots visible on the solar disk. That same year Schwabe published this interesting result in the Journal Astronomische Nachrichten, but it attracted little attention until 1851 when his sunspot data was included by Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) in volume III of his monumental “Kosmos.”

Table of Schwabe's sunspot observations for years 1826–1850 (column 1), the total number of sunspots groups observed on that year (column 2), the number of days without sunspots (column 3), and the number of days for which the Sun was observed (column 4).

Curiously, Schwabe's astronomical research initially won him greater recognition in England than in Germany. In February 1857 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 1868 he was elected to the Royal Society. While Schwabe's fame as an astronomer rests chiefly on his discovery of the sunspot cycle, he is also credited with the first description and drawing, in 1831, of Jupiter's great red spot.

Schwabe died in Dessau on April 11 , 1875.

Bibliography

Schwabe, S.H. 1843, Astronomische Nachrichten, 20, no. 495, 234-235.

Erfurth, H. 1989, in Samuel Heinrich Schwabe: Apotheker, Astronom, Botaniker, Dessau: Museum fur Naturkunde und Vorgeschichte.

von Humboldt, A. 1850, Kosmos. Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung, Stuttgart [199X reprint of english trans., XXX].

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1789

scientists

Charles A. Young (1834–1908)

Category

William Hyde Wollaston (1766–1828)

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Rudolf Wolf (1816–1893)

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Hermann Carl Vogel (1841–1907)

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Natalia Nikolayevna Stepanian (1931–2018)

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Gustav Spörer (1822–1895)

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Charlotte Moore Sitterly (1898–1990)

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Carolyn Jean Spellmann Shoemaker (1929–2021)

Honors and awards

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Angelo Secchi (1818–1878)

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Samuel Heinrich Schwabe (1789–1875)

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