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3. Leavitt’s Harvard
career and life
3a. Edward Pickering and
his philanthropists
In the late 1870’s under the
direction of Edward C. Pickering (1846-1919), the Harvard
College Observatory embarked on a survey to photograph and
catalog the brightness and spectrum of every star in the sky
accessible by the photographic means then available. Pickering,
a brilliant physicist, became the director of the Harvard
College Observatory in 1879 at the age of 32. He would remain
its director until his death in 1919. Pickering was always
short of funds and was adept at raising money from private
philanthropists including Mrs. Henry Draper, William Boyden, and
Catherine Bruce.
Figure 2. Edward
Pickering. From: http://www.klima-luft.de/steinicke/ngcic/persons/pickering.htm
Henry Draper (1837-1882), a
distinguished American amateur scientist and an early pioneer of
astronomical photography, was a physician by trade and born into
a prominent family. His father John William Draper (1811-1882)
was also an accomplished doctor, chemist, and a professor at New
York University (NYU). William Draper took the first
daguerreotype of the Moon in 1839, and Henry Draper became a
professor and dean of medicine at NYU. During his lifetime,
Henry Draper received numerous awards for his accomplishments,
including a Congressional medal for directing the US expedition
to photograph the 1874 transit of Venus. His wife, Anna Mary
Palmer (1839-1914), was a wealthy socialite prior to marrying
Henry. Henry died prematurely from pneumonia after a hunting
trip to the Rocky Mountains, and his wife established the Henry
Draper Memorial in 1886 to support photographic research in
astronomy. This Memorial funded the Henry Draper
Catalog[ue]1,
a massive photographic stellar spectrum survey, and the
Henry Draper Medal
both of which are still important today (Gibson, 2001).
The Henry Draper Catalog became one of the main research goals
for the Harvard College Observatory for almost 40 years.
Uriah A. Boyden (1804-1879) a
wealthy Boston inventor left $250,000 to a suitable astronomical
institution to build an observatory on a mountain with better
conditions than those currently available at the time of his
death. In 1887, Pickering convinced the trustees of Boyden’s
will to award this money to the Harvard College Observatory.
This money was eventually used to establish the Boyden Station
in the southern hemisphere. The southern skies were an
important part of Pickering’s effort to complete a photographic
survey of the entire sky.
Solon I. Bailey (1854-1931)
(best known for his discovery of RR Lyrae variable stars and for
his later history of the Harvard College Observatory) was sent
to Peru to establish the Boyden Station. After much initial
frustration and effort, Bailey finally settled on a site in the
remote town of Arequipa in 1891. After a disastrous 2 years of
mismanagement of the Arequipa station by William Henry Pickering
(1858-1938), the brother of Edward Pickering, Bailey returned to
Peru in 1893 with his family and started what was to become a
significant photographic survey spanning many years. The
Arequipa station was not closed by Harvard until 1927 when it
was moved to South Africa to establish the Boyden Observatory (Fernie,
2001; Wikipedia).
Figure 3. Solon
Bailey. From:
http://www.klima-luft.de/steinicke/ngcic/persons/bailey.htm
Catherine Wolfe
Bruce(1816-1900)3,
a noted patroness of astronomy, gave donations to Harvard
College Observatory and to the University of Chicago for the
building of research telescopes, one of which is the famous
Bruce Telescope at Yerkes Observatory. E.E. Barnard (1857-1923)
used this telescope to produce his celebrated An Atlas of
Selected Regions of the Milky Way published in 1927.
Another famous Bruce Telescope is the 24-inch (61 cm) f/5.6
astrograph used by Bailey at Arequipa. Edward Pickering
convinced Bruce to donate money for its construction.
This Bruce Telescope was the
largest wide-field photographic reflector ever used, and it now
resides at the Boyden Observatory in South Africa. Its
objective was optimized for work in the blue photographic
bandpass, and its 14 x17-inch plates recorded a sky area of 5.9
x 7.1 degrees with a plate scale of 60 arcseconds/mm. “The
Bruce Telescope was used to systematically photograph the
southern celestial hemisphere in the interval 1898-1904. At that
time, one-hour exposures reached 14th magnitude and
exposures up to six hours reached 18th magnitude. It
required 1,008 plate centers to cover the entire celestial
hemisphere, and 950 of these Bruce Regions were successfully
photographed…” (Williams, 2000).
This treasure trove of plates
from Arequipa combined with photographic plates from other
sources provided the Harvard College Observatory with an
increasing stack of data sources that had to be examined,
measured, analyzed, and cataloged. By the 1890’s, the Harvard
large scale photographic surveys had several thousand plates
that needed to be examined. This required measuring stellar
positions and stellar brightness and the tabulation of large
amounts of data. Pickering was always full of ideas for
projects and always short of the means to accomplish them. His
goal of cataloging every star in the sky reachable required
intensive use of skilled, but inexpensive labor. Pickering
solved his problem by employing a group of women astronomers who
each in her own way was creative, very well educated, and
willing to work as a volunteer or for low wages. It is
remarkable that Pickering was able to gather such a skilled
group of assistants to work so hard and so brilliantly for so
little remuneration or credit. |
