Edward Charles Pickering

American astronomer (1846–1919)

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Pickering graduated from Harvard in 1865. He taught physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming professor of astronomy and director of the observatory at Harvard in 1876, remaining there until his death in 1919.

Pickering made innovations in spectrography. Instead of placing a small prism at the focus to capture the light of a single star, he put a large prism in front of the objective, obtaining at the same time a spectrogram of all the stars in the field sufficiently bright to affect the emulsion. This made possible the massive surveys he wanted to organize and enabled the publication in 1918 of the Henry Draper Catalogue, compiled by Annie Cannon, giving the spectral types of 225,300 stars. The other innovation in instruments due to him was the meridian photometer introduced in 1880. In this, images of stars near the meridian would be reflected at the same time as the image of Polaris. The brightness could then be equalized and as the brightness of Polaris was known, that of the meridian stars could easily be calculated. More than a million observations with such instruments permitted the compilation of the Harvard catalog giving the magnitude of some 50,000 stars. He was able to include stars of the southern hemisphere in this catalog, for in 1891 he had established an observatory in Arequipa, Peru, with the help of his brother William Henry Pickering.

One further improvement due to Edward Pickering was his introduction, around 1900, of the alphabetic system of spectral classes.

The American astronomer Edward Charles Pickering (1846-1919) was a pioneer in the fields of stellar spectroscopy and photometry.

Edward Pickering was born on July 19, 1846, in Boston, Mass., of a distinguished New England family. After studying at Boston Latin School, he attended Lawrence Scientific School, graduating summa cum laude in 1865. He taught mathematics at that institution for a year and then moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, becoming Thayer professor of physics in 1868. He married Elizabeth Wardsworth Sparks in 1874.

In 1876 Pickering accepted the directorship of the Harvard Observatory, an appointment that both surprised and angered many, for he had no experience as an observational astronomer. The choice of a physicist, however, placed Harvard in the leadership of the trend, growing since the midcentury, toward a "new astronomy" which used the methods of the physicist to seek a knowledge of stellar structure and its evolution. The day of the observer, who noted the positions of heavenly bodies, was virtually over, and Pickering's appointment to such an important post may well have symbolized the victory of the new astronomy over the old.

The most important achievement of Pickering's directorate was in stellar photometry, a field barely explored with large instruments at the time. When he began the work, even the magnitudes of the stars were not fixed on any generally accepted scale. Pickering established a widely accepted scale and employed instruments, at least one - the meridian photometer - of his own invention, to achieve unprecedented accuracy in determining the magnitudes of 80, 000 stars.

Pickering's second work, begun in 1885, was the compilation of a "photographic library, " as he called it, giving a complete photographic chart of the stellar universe down to the eleventh magnitude on some 300, 000 glass plates. From such plates the past record of the stars may be studied; Pickering, for example, was able to plot the path of Eros in the sky from photographs taken 4 years before this asteroid was discovered.

Pickering was also a leader in stellar spectroscopy, laying the foundation for the method of spectral classification now universally accepted and obtaining the material for the Draper Catalogue, containing 200, 000 stars. He twice received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and was a founder in 1898 of the American Astronomical Society, of which he was later president. By the time of his death, on Feb. 3, 1919, he was generally recognized as one of the two or three outstanding astronomical researchers in America.

Further Reading

The only source of biographical data on Pickering is Solon I. Bailey, The History and Work of Harvard Observatory, 1839-1927 (1931). Bailey's memoir of Pickering, with a bibliography of Pickering's writings, is in National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, vol. 15 (1934).

Distinguished astronomer and a founding member of the American Society for Psychical Research. He was born on July 19, 1846, in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University (B.S., 1865). After graduation he taught mathematics and physics at Lawrence (1865-67) and then became a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1868-77). In 1877 he was appointed director of the Harvard Observatory, a position he held for 42 years. Pickering devised methods of measuring the magnitudes of stars and supervised the cataloguing of some 80,000 stars. He also established the Harvard Observatory auxiliary station at Arequipa, Peru, in 1891.

In the field of parapsychology, Pickering was vice president of the American Society for Psychical Research from 1885 to 1888 and served on the society's Committee on Thought Transference. He participated in the statistical analysis of experiments in telepathy using cards, dice, and numbers, a precursor to the methods later championed by parapsychology. He died on February 3, 1919, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Sources:

Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

Pickering, Edward Charles. "Possibility of Errors in Scientific Researches, Due to Thought-Transference." Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 1 (1885).

Pickering, Edward Charles, and J. M. Peirce. "Discussion of Returns in Response to Circular No. 4." Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research 1 (July 1885).

Pleasants, Helene, ed. Biographical Dictionary of Parapsychology. New York: Helix Press, 1964.

Edward Charles Pickering
Edward Charles Pickering
Born	July 19, 1846(1846-07-19)
Died	February 3, 1919 (aged 72)
Nationality	American
Fields	astronomy
Known for	spectroscopic binary stars

Edward Charles Pickering (July 19, 1846–February 3, 1919) was an American astronomer and physicist, brother of William Henry Pickering.

Along with Carl Vogel, Pickering discovered the first spectroscopic binary stars. He wrote Elements of Physical Manipulations (2 vol., 1873–76).

Pickering attended Boston Latin School, and received his B.S. from Harvard in 1865. Later, he served as director of Harvard College Observatory from 1877 to his death in 1919, where he made great leaps forward in the gathering of stellar spectra through the use of photography.

At Harvard, he recruited many women to work for him, including Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, and Antonia Maury. These women, who came to be known as "Pickering's Harem" by the scientific community, made several important discoveries at HCO. Leavitt's discovery of the period-luminosity relationship for Cepheids, published by Pickering^[1], would prove the foundation for the modern understanding of cosmological distances.

In 1876 he co-founded the Appalachian Mountain Club.

In 1911 he co-founded the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) with William T. Olcott.

Contents 1 Publications 2 Honors 3 References 4 External links 4.1 Obituaries

Publications

• Pickering (1912), "THE ALLEGHENY OBSERVATORY IN ITS RELATION TO ASTRONOMY.", Science 36 (927): 417–421, 1912 Oct 4, doi:10.1126/science.36.927.417, PMID 17788756 

Honors

Awards

• Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1886 and 1901)
• Henry Draper Medal (1888)
• Bruce Medal (1908)

Named after him

• The crater Pickering on the Moon
• The crater Pickering Mars.
• Asteroid 784 Pickeringia

(all jointly named after him and his brother William Henry Pickering)

References

1. ^ Miss Leavitt in Pickering, Edward C. "Periods of 25 Variable Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud" Harvard College Observatory Circular 173 (1912) 1-3.

External links

• Works by Edward Pickering at Project Gutenberg

Obituaries

• (German) AN 208 (1919) 133/134
• JRASC 13 (1919) 160
• MNRAS 80 (1920) 360
• PASP 31 (1919) 73

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