Grasslands Observatory - Essays - xxxxx

NOTES:

1. The original Henry Draper Catalog was published by Annie Jump Cannon and EC Pickering between 1918 and 1924 as Volumes 91-99 of the Harvard Annals. It contains astrometric and spectroscopic data for 225, 300 stars down to 9^th magnitude. It is variously referred to as a catalog or catalogue.

2. The Henry Draper Medal is awarded by the US National Academy of Sciences for contributions in astrophysics. Among notable award winners are EC Pickering (1888), William Huggins (1901), George Ellery Hale (1904), Henry Norris Russell (1922), Arthur Eddington (1924), Harlow Shapley (1926), Annie Jump Cannon (1931), and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1971).

3. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) awards its highest honor, the Catherine Wolfe Bruce gold medal, for lifetime contributions to astronomy. Edward Pickering won the award in 1908, Edwin Hubble in 1938, and Harlow Shapley in 1939 (Tenn, 2003).

4. Annie Jump Cannon (along with Wilhelmina Fleming) is credited with setting up the modern system for stellar spectral classification. She classified 400,000 stellar bodies and discovered more than 300 variable stars, 5 novae, and one spectroscopic binary star. She also published the Henry Draper Catalog (1918-1924) and the Henry Draper Extension (1925-1936, 1949). In addition, she was the first woman to win an honorary degree from Oxford University (Physics History, 2000).

5. Wilhelmina Fleming first suggested giving stellar classes an alphabetical sequence. This evolved into the now famous OBAFGKM sequence. She also discovered RR Lyrae’s variability and was involved in the publication of the Henry Draper Catalog as well as discovering 10 novae, 220 variable stars, and the first white dwarfs. Fleming was originally Pickering’s housekeeper (Johnson, 2005).

6. Antonia Maury was the niece of Henry Draper. She is noted for her spectroscopic analysis of Beta Lyrae as well as her classification and explanation of differing spectral line widths, which was used by Ejnar Hertzsrprung for identifying giant and dwarf stars.

7. The Hooker telescope is named for John D. Hooker, a Los Angeles businessman who donated $45,000 to cover the cost of the mirror, because he wanted his named attached to the largest telescope ever built.

8. A complex statistical method in which the mean parallax of a group of stars at approximately the same distance is estimated by looking at their apparent motions through the sky.

9. Gosta Mittag-Leffler, a world famous mathematician, founded Acta Mathematica in 1882. He also had the finest mathematical library in the world. He and his wife bequeathed their library and estate at Djursholm, Sweden near Stockholm to the Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1916. The Mittag-Leffler Institute (http://www.mittag-leffler.se/) was set up based on his house and is a major mathematical research center.

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