Pickering, Edward Charles (1846–1919)
Prominent American astronomer who pioneered the development of the color
index method for cataloguing stars and who encouraged many young scientists
into astronomy, including (unusually for the time) many women. Pickering
graduated from Harvard and then taught physics for 10 years at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, where he built the first instructional physics
laboratory in the United States. Appointed at age 30 as director the Harvard
College Observatory, he served in this post for 42 years. He and his
staff made visual photometric studies of 45,000 stars. With funds provided
by Henry Draper's widow, Anna Palmer Draper, he hired a number of women,
including Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump
Cannon, Antonia Maury, and Henrietta Leavitt,
and produced the Henry Draper
Catalogue, with objective prism spectra of hundreds of thousands
of stars classified according to Cannon's "Harvard sequence." He established
a station in Peru to make the southern photographs and published the first
all-sky photographic map. He and Hermann Vogel independently discovered
the first spectroscopic binary stars.
He also discovered a new series of spectral lines, now known as the Pickering
series, that turned out to be due to ionized helium. Pickering encouraged
amateur astronomers and was a founder of the American Association of Variable
Star Observers.
Adapted in part from the biographical
entry at The Bruce Medalists website
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