William Henry Pickering
| William Henry Pickering | |
|---|---|
Pickering in 1909
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| Born | February 15, 1858 Boston, Massachusetts |
| Died | January 16, 1938 (aged 79) Mandeville, Jamaica |
| Fields | Astronomy |
| Education | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1897) |
| Notable awards |
Lalande Prize (1905) Prix Jules Janssen (1909) |
William Henry Pickering (February 15, 1858 – January 16, 1938) was an American astronomer. Pickering constructed and established several observatories or astronomical observation stations, notably including Percival Lowell's Flagstaff Observatory. He led solar eclipse expeditions and studied craters on the Moon, and hypothesized that changes in the appearance of the crater Eratosthenes were due to "lunar insects". He spent much of the later part of his life at his private observatory in Jamaica.
William Pickering was born on February 15, 1858 in Boston, Massachusetts. His older brother was Edward Charles Pickering, director of the Harvard College Observatory for three decades.
He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1879 then became an instructor in physics from 1880 to 1887.
He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1883 at age 25.
He discovered Saturn's ninth moon Phoebe in 1899 from plates taken in 1898. He produced a photographic atlas of the Moon: The Moon : A Summary of the Existing Knowledge of our Satellite in 1903.
He believed he discovered a tenth moon in 1905 from plates taken in 1904, which he called "Themis". For this discovery he was awarded the Lalande Prize of the French Academy of Sciences in 1905. "Themis" was later shown to not exist.
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