Henry Draper Medal

Samuel Pierpont Langley was an American astronomer, physicist, inventor of the bolometer and pioneer of aviation...

Edward Charles Pickering 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 .Pickering attended Boston Latin School, and received his B.S. from...

Henry Augustus Rowland was a U.S. physicist. Between 1899 and 1901 he served as the first president of the American Physical Society...

Hermann Carl Vogel was a German astronomer. He was born in Leipzig, Kingdom of Saxony.Vogel pioneered the use of the spectroscope in astronomy...

-Career:Keeler worked at Lick Observatory beginning in 1888, but left after being appointed director of the University of Pittsburgh's Allegheny Observatory in 1891. He returned to Lick Observatory as its director in 1898, but died not long after in 1900. He had married in 1891 and left a widow and...

Sir William Huggins, OM, FRS was an English astronomer best known for his pioneering work in astronomical spectroscopy.- Life and work :...

George Ellery Hale was an American solar astronomer, born in Chicago. He was educated at MIT, at the Observatory of Harvard College, , and at Berlin...

William Wallace Campbell was an American astronomer, and director of Lick Observatory from 1900 to 1930. He specialized in spectroscopy....

Charles Greeley Abbot was an American astrophysicist, astronomer and Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He was born in Wilton, New Hampshire.-Life:...

Henri Alexandre Deslandres was a French astronomer, director of the Meudon and Paris Observatories.Deslandres' undergraduate years at the École Polytechnique were played out against the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War and the chaos of the Paris Commune so, on graduation in 1874, he responded...

Joel Stebbins was an American astronomer who pioneered photoelectric photometry in astronomy. He earned his Ph.D at the University of California. He was director of University of Illinois observatory from 1903 to 1922 and the Washburn Observatory at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1922...

Albert Abraham Michelson was an American physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light and especially for the Michelson-Morley experiment. He is the father of modern theoretical physics. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics...

Walter Sydney Adams was an American astronomer.-Life and work:He was born in Antioch, Syria to missionary parents, and was brought to the U.S. in 1885 He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1898, then continued his education in Germany...

Maurice Paul Auguste Charles Fabry was a French physicist.He and Henri Buisson discovered the ozone layer in 1913. In optics, he discovered an explanation for the phenomenon of interference fringes...

Alfred Fowler was an English astronomer.He was an expert in spectroscopy, being one of the first to determine that the temperature of sunspots was cooler than that of surrounding regions.-Honours:...

Pieter Zeeman was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Hendrik Lorentz for his discovery of the Zeeman effect.-Childhood and youth:...

Henry Norris Russell was an American astronomer who, along with Ejnar Hertzsprung, developed the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram ....

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS was a British astrophysicist of the early 20th century. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, or the radiation generated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honour.He is famous for his work regarding the Theory of...

Harlow Shapley was an American astronomer.-Career:He was born on a farm in Nashville, Missouri, and dropped out of school with only the equivalent of a fifth-grade education...

William Hammond Wright was an American astronomer. He was director of the Lick Observatory from 1935 until 1942....

Annie Jump Cannon was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. With Edward C...

Vesto Melvin Slipher was an American astronomer. His brother Earl C. Slipher was also an astronomer and a director at the Lowell Observatory. His children are son David C. Slipher and daughter Marcia Frances Slipher NicholsonSlipher was born in Mulberry, Indiana, and completed his doctorate at...

John Stanley Plaskett was a Canadian astronomer.He worked as a machinist, and was offered a job as a mechanician at the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto, constructing apparatuses and assisting with demonstrations during lectures...

Charles Edward Kenneth Mees was a British-American physicist and photographic researcher.He was born in Wellingborough, England, the son of a Wesleyan minister, and attended the University of London. In 1906 he was awarded his D.Sc. with a dissertation on photographic theory...

Robert Williams Wood was a physicist and inventor. He is often cited as being a pivotal contributor to the field of optics and is best known for giving birth to the so-called "black-light effect"...

Ira Sprague Bowen was an American astronomer. A graduate of Oberlin College and the California Institute of Technology, he taught physics at Caltech from 1921 to 1945...

Paul Willard Merrill was an American astronomer whose specialty was spectroscopy. He received his Ph.D at the University of California in 1913. He spent the bulk of his career at Mount Wilson Observatory, from which he retired in 1952. He studied unusual stars, particularly long-period variable...

Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German-American physicist, and Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. A versatile theoretical physicist, Bethe also made important contributions to quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics, solid-state physics and particle...

----Otto Struve was a Ukrainian - Russian-American astronomer. In Russian, his name is sometimes given as Otto Lyudvigovich Struve ; however, he spent most of his life and his entire scientific career in the United States.Otto Struve was one of the few eminent astronomers in the pre-Space...

Bernard Ferdinand Lyot was a French astronomer.His interest in astronomy started in 1914. He soon acquired a telescope and soon upgraded to a . From graduation in 1918 until 1929, he worked as a demonstrator at the Ecole Polytechnique...

Hendrik Christoffel "Henk" van de Hulst was a Dutch astronomer and mathematician.In 1944, while a student in Utrecht, he predicted the existence of the 21 cm hyperfine line of neutral interstellar hydrogen...

Horace Welcome Babcock was an American astronomer. He was the son of Harold D. Babcock.He invented and built a number of astronomical instruments, and in 1953 was the first to propose the idea of adaptive optics. He specialized in spectroscopy and the study of magnetic fields of stars...

Martin Schwarzschild was a German American astronomer. He was the son of famed astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild and the nephew of the Swiss astrophysicist Robert Emden....

Richard Tousey was an American astronomer. He was a pioneer in the observation of the sun from space.He won the Henry Draper Medal in 1963, the Eddington Medal in 1964, and the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship in 1966....

Sir Martin Ryle was an English radio astronomer who developed revolutionary radio telescope systems and used them for accurate location and imaging of weak radio sources...

Bengt Edlén was a Swedish professor of physics and astronomer who specialized in spectroscopy. He participated in solving the Corona Mystery: unidentified spectral lines in the sun's spectrum were speculatively believed to originate from a hitherto unidentified chemical element termed coronium...

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, FRS , ) was an Indian American astrophysicist. He was a Nobel laureate in physics along with William Alfred Fowler for their work in the theoretical structure and evolution of stars. He was the nephew of Indian Nobel Laureate Sir C. V...

Lyman Strong Spitzer, Jr. was an American theoretical physicist and astronomer best known for his research in star formation and for his promotions of telescopes in space and research into plasma physics.-Career:...

Arno Allan Penzias is an American physicist and Nobel laureate in physics.Penzias was born in Munich, Germany. At age six he was among the Jewish children evacuated to Britain as part of the Kindertransport rescue operation. Six months later his parents also fled Nazi Germany for the U.S., and...

For the American President, see Woodrow Wilson.Robert Woodrow Wilson is an American astronomer, Nobel laureate in physics, who with Arno Allan Penzias discovered in 1964 the cosmic microwave background radiation...

William Wilson Morgan was an American astronomer.The principal theme in Morgan's work was the study of stellar and galaxy classification. Along...

Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr. is an American astrophysicist and Nobel Prize in Physics laureate for his discovery with Russell Alan Hulse of a "new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation."-Biography:Taylor was born in Philadelphia to Joseph Hooton...

Marta Patricia Haynes is a Ph. D. in Astronomy. She graduated 1978 from Indiana University. She is currently employed at Cornell University as a Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy. Her specialty areas are radio astronomy and radar astronomy...

Ralph Asher Alpher was a U.S. cosmologist.-Childhood and Education:Alpher was the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, Samuel Alpher, from Vitebsk, Russia. His mother, Rose, died of stomach cancer in 1938 and his father later remarried...

Robert Herman was a United States scientist, best known for his work with Ralph Alpher in 1948-50, on estimating the temperature of cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang explosion....

Bohdan Paczyński or Bohdan Paczynski was a Polish astronomer, a leading scientist in theory of the evolution of stars, accretion discs and gamma ray bursts....

Paul Butler is an astronomer who searches for extrasolar planets.He received a BA and an MS from San Francisco State University, completing a Master's thesis with Geoffrey Marcy, and then completed his doctoral studies at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1993...

Geoffrey W. Marcy is famous for discovering more extrasolar planets than anyone else, 70 out of the first 100 to be discovered, along with R. Paul Butler and Debra Fischer. He also confirmed Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz's discovery of the first extrasolar planet 51 Pegasi b...

Dr. Charles L. Bennett is an American observational astrophysicist and a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the Principal Investigator of NASA's highly successful Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe...

Neil Gehrels is an astrophysicist specializing in the field of Gamma-ray astronomy. He graduated in 1976 with Bachelor's degrees in music and physics from the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in physics in 1982 from the California Institute of Technology. He is married to Ellen...