AAS Meeting #194 - Chicago, Illinois, May/June 1999
Session 33. HAD III: Gender, Observatories, Planetariums
Historical, Oral, Monday, May 31, 1999, 2:00-3:30pm, Continental Ballroom C

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[33.04] Ten Years' Work of an Urban Observatory: Ralph Curtiss and the Detroit Spectrographic Program

R.P. Lindner (U. of Michigan)

The University of Michigan developed a productive and path-breaking spectroscopic program in the years before World War I. This paper discusses the motivation for the creation of the program, its funding, how staff was hired, fired, and retained, and the choice and evolution of the particular spectroscopic program. A number of interesting workers passed through the program during these years, and significant work on classification, physical analysis, and the study of stars with emission spectra appeared. The research for this paper is based on work in the personal and institutional archives of the staff of the Michigan observatories and in some of the working papers of the Observatory.


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