History - Gould
Benjamin Apthorp Gould,
the first American to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy, was born in
Boston in 1824. He earned a degree from Harvard, and traveled to
Europe to pursue his education in astronomy. After stays at
several European observatories, he earned his Ph.D. under the
celebrated mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss at
the University of Gottingen, Germany. He returned to the U.S. to
found the first American journal of astronomy, the Astronomical
Journal, in 1849, and to carry out studies of longitude
determination for the U.S. Coast Survey.
While in this post, he became the first director of the
Dudley Observatory. His brief
(1856-1858) tenure was marred by the Dudley
Observatory Controversy. He returned to Cambridge and to the
Coast Survey, and engaged for some years in business to repair
family fortunes. In 1864 he married Mary Apthorp Quincy, daughter
of the president of Harvard, and returned to full time astronomy.
He pioneered in astronomical photography from his home observatory
in Cambridge. Then, in 1870, he traveled to Argentina to found and
direct the Observatorio
National Argentino in Cordoba, Argentina. There he made an
exhaustive survey of Southern stars, the Uranometria
Argentina, made precise determinations of the positions of
more than 50,000 Southern stars, continued his efforts in
astronomical photography, and discovered the southern portion of a
belt of bright stars on the edges of the Milky Way. That belt is
now called the Gould belt in his honor. When Gould returned to
Cambridge, he reestablished the Astronomical Journal with the
assistance of Seth A. Chandler.
Chandler would also complete the publishing the
Resultados after Gould's death. An original member of
the National Academy of Sciences, he continued to carry out and
champion astronomical research until his death in 1896.
In his lifetime, he acquired a superb historical collection of
astronomical books, a portion of which forms the
Gould
collection in the Dudley Observatory
Library Many of Gould's letters to the trustees of Dudley
Observatory both before and during the Controversy
can be found in the Dudley
Observatory Archives.
Portrait of B.A. Gould at the Dudley
Observatory
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Links:
Benjamin Apthorp Gould.
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BENJAMIN APTHORP
GOULD AND THE FOUNDING
OF THE
ASTRONOMICAL JOURNAL
OWEN GINGERICH
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NAS
biography
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Argentinian
biography (in Spanish)
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B.A.
Gould & the AAS
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Photograph
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Short
biography and further links
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An
update on the science of the Gould Belt, an
important collection of stars named after Gould,
who (though he did not discover it) first explored
its implications.
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