David H. DeVorkin

Internationalism, Kapteyn and the Dutch Pipeline

Internationalism in science, particularly in astronomy and the geophysical sciences, has taken on many forms, reflecting the need to record synoptically as well as over both spatially and temporally large landscapes. By the late eightteenth century Alexander von Humboldt was teaming up with Biot, Gay-Lussac and others to create international geomagnetic campaigns called “World Magnetic Surveys” and these efforts were continued by the Magnetic Crusades at mid-century. Cooperative programs in astronomy were at first geodetic in nature, determining the figure of the earth from ever-larger “arc of the meridian” surveys. Possibly the first truly international cooperative effort was the observation of the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769 to determine the solar parallax. This sort of cooperation required simultaneous observations from widely spaced points. Also in this category were observations of asteroids, first organized by David Gill in the 1880s, culminating in the world-wide Eros Campaign of 1900–1901, and again in 1930–1931. A somewhat different form of cooperation appeared as the International Latitude Service in 1898 centered in Turin, with standardized observatories across the globe.

Electronics in astronomy: Early applications of the photoelectric cell and photomultiplier for studies of point-source celestial phenomena

Photoelectric detection devices have been in use in astronomy for over 80 years, but gained wide popularity and utility only since World War II. After the turn of the Century, early photoconductive selenium cells were quickly replaced by photoemissive cells utilizing potassium hydride photocathodes, and then by photoelectric photomultipliers amplified by vacuum tube dc circuits. As the reliability and sensitivity of photoelectric systems increased, and as electronic components became more accessible, more and more astronomers turned to this new technology to measure with previously unobtainable precision the brightness of celestial objects. This paper identifies those who helped to improve and apply electronic detector technology to astronomy. Their research interests and backgrounds will be discussed, as will the role of World War II in bringing astronomers into contact with electronic technology.

Community and Spectral Classification in Astrophysics: The Acceptance of E. C. Pickering's System in 1910

I F THE DATE OF BIRTH OF ASTROPHYSICS were to be identified, it ought to be 1859. In that year Gustav Robert Kirchhoff analyzed the solar spectrum, and from that time on a significant fraction of the worlds astronomers began using spectrum analysis in studying the physical constitution of celestial bodies. By its tenth birthday astrophysics had many discoveries to its credit: for example, that true nebulae exist as gaseous clouds in space; that hydrogen and many other elements are contained in the sun; that the motions of the stars in the line of sight can be detected and measured; that the sun has a definite gaseous atmosphere; and that the stars can be classified by their spectra. It is the ramifications of this last discovery that are explored here. Specifically, we examine how a system of classification was finally agreed upon by the astronomical community. The central event in our study is the 1910 meeting of the International Solar Union, when a decision was made to expand the scope of the Union to include stellar astrophysics and, as a first step, to form a committee to review all schemes of classification that were in use at that date. Were the factors influencing consensus on classification purely scientific, or did nonscientific elements have a significant influence? To what degree were shared beliefs and concepts extant in the yet young community of astrophysicists, and to what degree did these shared perceptions aid or prevent agreement on a single scheme of classification? I Reviews of the various systems of stellar spectral classification have appeared in several places, so only a summary is provided here, to set the stage for

Space artifact or Nazi weapon? Displaying the Smithsonian's V-2 missile, 1976-2011.

Debates over how or how not to display intrinsically controversial subjects in a museum setting have been part of museum life for decades. And the Smithsonian Institution on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., has more often than not been a ‘flash point’ [1] for episodes ranging from the interwar controversy over the Langley Aerodrome and Wright Flyer, to the so-called ‘rerun of the Scopes trial’ in a 1978 suit brought against the Smithsonian, to the Enola Gay affair of 1994–1995. Stakeholders from every conceivable walk of life have, at one time or another, expressed annoyance with the way some part of human culture, or the natural world, is portrayed. Accordingly, the Smithsonian has gone through cycles where it becomes very cautious about what it displays, and how it displays, social, cultural and scientific artifacts, notably since Enola Gay [2–8]. To be sure, in behaving this way, the Smithsonian is no doubt a reflection of larger forces that have tried to shape what it is and does, forces that reflect behavioral norms and values in a nation’s constant search for identity. A case in point, for the purposes of setting the stage for this essay, is why the National Mall of the United States does not have an explicitly military museum, and how the Smithsonian has become, in effect, a surrogate agent in the process. Beyond a pervasive suspicion and antipathy toward showcasing the armed forces on the Mall, as Joanne London has argued, there were other forces, including ‘the Smithsonian’s exhibition traditions, personalities, bureaucratic obstacles, the military establishment’s ambivalence about the value of museums, the United States’ involvement in the Korean and Vietnam war and the general environment of the Cold War, and changes in museology. . .’ [9, p. 259]. London traces the historical pathways through which military interests attempted to establish a presence on the National Mall, and how, in 1961, Congress attempted to control or moderate this drive by creating a National Armed Forces Museum Advisory Board to the Institution that would authorize some form of coverage. This fostered a debate centered on the question of whether the Smithsonian’s newly established Museum of History and Technology (now the National Museum of American History) could better address the expressed desires of the military than could a wholly new museum bureau devoted to the subject. The Smithsonian resisted the idea of a new bureau, arguing in a position paper in about 1960 that it could better integrate ‘the military exhibits into a museum

Capturing the light

The Perfect Machine: Building the Palomar Telescope.By Ronald Florence. Harper-Collins: 1994. Pp. 434.

SAO During the Whipple Years

27.50.Stairway to the Stars: The Story of the Worlds Largest Observatory. By Barry Parker. Plenum: 1994. Pp. 332.

The Harvard summer school in astronomy

27.95.

Steps toward the Hertsprung–Russell Diagram

In 1955, the moribund Astrophysical Observatory of the Smithsonian Institution closed its doors on the south lawn of the Smithsonian Castle. Vestiges of its 60-year old legacy of monitoring solar radiation were transferred to Cambridge under a new name, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and became housed within the Harvard College Observatory complex under the direction of Fred Whipple. Whipple, restarting the SAO almost from scratch, worked within the Smithsonian’s ancient tradition of maintaining a world-wide network of solar observation stations by morphing it into a similar network of satellite tracking facilities for the IGY, quickly and quietly phasing out the solar work. Under the SAO name, however, Whipple did much more, vastly expanding his interests in meteor research and hyperballistic studies, deftly orchestrated to parallel his tracking facility empire which in time included aeroballistic studies, atomic time standards, and other associated technological and scientific campaigns. He also made sure SAO played a prominent role in NASA’s emerging ‘observatory class’ series of scientific satellites and used it to create a theoretical astrophysics unit. It is this last activity that we will introduce here, showing how Project Celescope fitted into Whipple’s plan for SAO, and how it contributed to make the combined Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics the largest astronomical organization on the planet by the 1970s.

Resource Letter EMAA-1: Educational Materials in Astronomy and Astrophysics

Professional astronomy in the 1920s and 1930s was a science in transition. Modern relativistic cosmologies were born, and three major areas of modern physics became central to progress in astronomy: quantum mechanics, nuclear physics and relativity. The old empirical and quantitative methods of spectroscopic astronomy, methods that generated vast amounts of systematic knowledge of the spectra of the Sun and stars and the dynamics of stellar systems, were being supplemented by rational and quantitative methods. These new techniques promised to reveal not only the compositions of the Sun and stars, their sources of energy and their ages, but also the origin and ultimate fate of the universe.

The Development of Mauna Kea as an Astronomical Site Panelists: John Jefferies, Ann Boesgaard, Alan Stockton, Eric Becklin, and Alan Tokunaga

Every student of stellar astronomy encounters the fundamental relationship expressed by the Hertzsprung–Russell Diagram. One cannot effectively discuss stars—how they are born, live and die, how they are distributed in space and how our Sun fits amongst them—without using this relationship as a fundamental tool of communication.