Harvey Raymond Butcher
| Harvey Butcher | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 3, 1947 |
| Alma mater |
California Institute of Technology, B.Sc. Australian National University, Ph.D. |
| Known for | Galaxy evolution, Stellar abundances, Astronomical Instrumentation, Low Frequency Radio Astronomy, Butcher-Oemler Effect |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Astrophysics |
| Institutions | Australian National University |
Harvey Raymond Butcher III is an astronomer who has made significant contributions in observational astronomy and instrumentation which have advanced understanding of the formation of stars and of the universe. He received a B.Sc. in Astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology in 1969, where he contributed to the development of advanced infrared spectrometry applied in the first survey of the sky at infrared wavelengths (the Two Micron Sky Survey project).
Butcher received his PhD from the Australian National University in 1974 for research involving the construction of one of the first high resolution echelle spectrographs in astronomy and its application to elucidating the abundances of R- and S-process chemical elements in dwarf stars of widely differing ages and mean abundance levels.
He continued his focus on developing instrumentation to solve observational problems in cosmology as the Bart J. Bok Fellow at the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona from 1974 to 1976, where he characterized anomalous abundances in extreme halo stars and pioneered the application of the then new 2D (digital TV) vidicon systems and early CCD detectors for photometry of faint stars and galaxies.
From 1976 to 1983 he held the position of Astronomer at the Kitt Peak National Observatory, Tucson, Arizona, where he spearheaded the technique of multi-aperture spectroscopy for observing very faint, high redshift galaxies, and was project scientist for several new observing instruments, including an early speckle spectrograph for obtaining spatially resolved spectra at resolutions approaching the diffraction limit. In 1978, along with Augustus Oemler, Jr., he discovered that rich galaxy clusters at large distances (z>0.2) have an excess of galaxies with blue colors when compared to similar nearby low redshift clusters. This is now known as the Butcher–Oemler Effect.
...
Wikipedia