 |  |
| Obituaries |
| ||||||
| Astronomy & Geophysics 45 (2) 2.38 | | |||||
| ||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||
|
Jesse Leonard Greenstein, 1909–2002
Gold Medallist of the RAS, pioneer spectroscopist, lively and influential US astronomy policy-maker and organizer. Jesse Leonard Greenstein, Dubridge Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology and Associate and Gold Medallist (1975) of the RAS, died at the age of 92 in October 2002. Greenstein will be remembered for his pioneering work in astronomical spectroscopy, for his statesmanship in US astronomy and for his creation of the great astronomy department at Caltech. In his autobiographical article “An Astronomical Life” (1984 Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics22 1) Jesse wrote with characteristic irony: “I lack the often-quoted advantages of an impoverished and embittered childhood.” He grew up in a prosperous Jewish family in Manhattan NY and early on showed indications of scientific talent. While still at school he was a radio ham and he did experiments with a spectroscope, foreshadowing his later work as an astronomer. Jesse went to Harvard at the age of 16 and graduated with a BS in astronomy in 1929. He had planned to spend a year in Oxford (where he might have become a theorist) but instead decided to join the family real-estate business to ride out the depression. In 1934 Jesse returned to Harvard to study for a PhD. His thesis was on observations and theory of interstellar reddening. After graduating in 1937 he went on an NRC Fellowship to the Yerkes Observatory and then went on to join the University of Chicago astrophysics faculty. After wartime work designing optics for the military, Jesse joined the Caltech faculty in 1947. He was in a unique situation, hired to build up a graduate department of astronomy for a relatively new institution with the Palomar 200-inch telescope coming on line and no astronomy graduate students and only one faculty member – Fritz Zwicky, a great and extraordinarily creative astronomer who could on occasions be difficult. Jesse quickly built up a staff that by 1960 included Zwicky, Guido Munch, John Bolton, Bev Oke and Maarten Schmidt. The Caltech astronomy department was quickly recognized as being one of the outstanding centres of research and graduate education in the USA and was rated by the National Research Council as the top ranked department as early as 1964. Jesse remained executive officer (the Caltech expression for chairman) for astronomy until 1972 and retired as Dubridge Professor Emeritus in 1979. He stopped observing in 1983 but continued to be active in research until his late 80s. Most of Jesse's research was on the physics of stars, the interstellar medium and, as he described, “briefly and uncomfortably” on quasars. He made an early attempt to explain Grote Reber's discovery of radio emission from the Milky Way and later he helped to devise the Davis and Greenstein mechanism for aligning elongated interstellar grains in a magnetic field. However, most of Jesse's work was in stellar spectroscopy using the coude spectrographs on the 100- and 200-inch telescopes. In the 1950s his work on stellar abundances was done in concert with the experimental and theoretical work on nucleosynthesis carried out at the Caltech Kellogg Laboratory under W A Fowler. Many important discoveries were made by Jesse and his students and postdocs during this period, including the identification of metal-poor (Population II) stars among the “sub-dwarfs” and the discovery of helium 3 in stars. Later he concentrated on the spectra of M-dwarfs and white dwarfs, including UV data obtained with IUE. Jesse was particularly fascinated by the extraordinary spectra produced by very strong magnetic fields in white dwarfs; it is remarkable that he was a pioneer in this field in his late 70s and 80s. More details of his scientific work can be found in “The Scientific Career of Jesse L Greenstein” (A M Boesgaard 1988 IAU Symposium 132 xvii–xxiii). Photographic plates were used through most of Jesse's career. Spectra were widened by setting the drive in right ascension to be slightly faster or slower than the sidereal rate so that the star image moved slowly along the slit. When the image reached the end of the slit the astronomer would press the E or W button to return the image to its starting point. Jesse loved to smoke small, evil-smelling cigars. Knowledgeable students and postdocs could identify a Greenstein plate by the uneven exposure along the slit – caused by flecks of cigar ash settling during the exposure. Jesse had a profound influence on US science policy. He was active in the founding of NRAO and chaired the second decadal review of astronomy for the NRC published in 1970 which, among other recommendations, led to the construction of the VLA. He was active in founding the National Observatories at Kitt Peak and later at Cerro Tololo, although he thought initially that NRAO should be operated by one of the large private observatories. Later, Jesse served a term as chairman of the AURA board. Jesse won many honours. He was a member of the US National Academy and was awarded the Bruce Gold Medal. He was California Scientist of the Year in 1964. Jesse was particularly proud of the RAS Gold Medal. I recall an occasion at our house in Pasadena in the early 70s when Jesse and Fred Hoyle awed the younger people by comparing the quality of the gold in their various medals. Jesse was quite short in stature; he had a deep, resonant voice and radiated energy. He had a mercurial temperament, showed his emotions easily and could be difficult in the short term. However, in the long term he was wise, tolerant, magnanimous and farsighted. Jesse loved fast cars and for a time held the record for the trip from Caltech to Palomar (later claimed by Olin Eggen). Jesse welcomed students, postdocs and faculty members to Caltech from all over the world; in fact when I joined the faculty in 1966 he was the only optical astronomer who had been born in the States. It was a happy and collegial department in which everyone accepted Jesse's leadership. Almost every day he would lead a group over from the Robinson Laboratory of Astrophysics at Caltech to the Athenaeum faculty club for lunch. Postdocs were welcome at these lunches and several of us took the opportunity to learn more about the technicalities of astronomy as well as the wider world of our subject. The Athenaeum provided, as it still does, paper place-mats and Jesse could seldom resist turning his over to draw an equation or a Grotrian diagram in his characteristic spiky handwriting. Jesse was a man of broad culture. He remembered the Latin learned in high school and was well versed in literature. Like many astronomers of the older generation, he loved to guide the telescope to the sound of classical music. He was particularly fond of Beethoven's late string quartets; the cavatina from Opus 130 was played at his Caltech memorial. In 1959 I went to Caltech as a postdoc to work in Jesse's “Abundance Project” financed by the US Air Force and then served with him as a colleague on the Caltech faculty from 1966. Jesse was an inspiration to everyone who had the privilege of working with him. He was not only an astronomer of remarkable breadth, energy and resourcefulness and a scientific statesman, he was also a natural leader and, by any standards, a great man. Wallace L W Sargent 
Jesse Greenstein |
| |||||||||||
| ||||||||||||
| |||||||||||
| |||||||||||
|
R H Tucker, 1922–2003
Fellow of the RAS, distinguished positional astronomer and Herstmonceux stalwart. Roy Henry “Tommy” Tucker, who died suddenly on 4 May 2003, was born in Southsea on 25 September 1922. His father was a post-office telegraphist in the Royal Navy. He spent his early childhood in Malta and Gibraltar, where he went to school at the Christian Brothers' College until he was 12. On returning to England he attended Portsmouth Grammar School. A few weeks before the outbreak of war in 1939, while still only 16, he obtained a post at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, through the Civil Service Clerical Examination. He was one of the first to be recruited through open competition; hitherto, junior staff had been recruited directly from local Greenwich schools. Tommy joined the Time Department, under Humphrey Smith, which was evacuated from Greenwich to Abinger in October 1940. He joined the RAF in 1942 and served in Iceland, with a radio communications unit under Coastal Command. He returned to Abinger in 1947, at a time when the Greenwich Time Service was undergoing rapid evolution. The first quartz clock had been installed at Greenwich in 1939 and during the next few years the high long-term stability of quartz clocks rendered the pendulum clocks obsolete for maintaining the Time Service. But the high performance of the quartz clocks revealed irregularities in the determination of GMT from astronomical observations, due to the movement of the pole, seasonal fluctuations in the length of the day and serious systematic errors in the catalogue co-ordinates of stars used in meridian transit observations. Extensive studies of all these effects were carried out in the computing section of the Time Department, under Tucker; he was co-author, with Humphrey Smith, of a definitive analysis of the annual fluctuation in the Earth's rotation, which was published in Monthly Notices in 1953. While at Abinger, Tucker studied for a BSc at evening classes in Guildford. In 1956 Tucker was transferred to the Meridian Department at Herstmonceux, where he remained for the rest of his career. He succeeded P A Wayman as head of the department in 1964. During the 1960s the RGO was heavily engaged in an international collaboration of meridian observations of faint stars, to be used as a frame of reference for a new photographic coverage (AGK3) of the northern hemisphere by the Hamburg observatory. This was the last major programme undertaken on the Cooke Transit Circle which had been first installed at Greenwich in 1933. Observations with the Cooke instrument, on the Herstmonceux site, were limited to approximately visual magnitude 9. It was becoming clear that there was a need for extending this limit, which would require major instrumental development and a move to a better site. A collaboration was set up between RGO, the University of Copenhagen, Brorfelde, and the Spanish Naval Observatory, San Fernando, to move the Danish instrument, which was undergoing a major development for completely automatic operation, to La Palma; the removal was financed by a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation. This project represented a major advance in positional astronomy, which had been traditionally very labour-intensive. As leader of the RGO team in this collaboration, Tucker contributed to the detailed planning of the complete operating system including the observational routine and data reduction, until his retirement in 1982. The Carlsberg Automatic Meridian Circle came into regular use in 1984, and since then has been a world leader in productivity in meridian astronomy. Tucker was elected a Fellow of the Society in 1949, and President of IAU Commission 8 (Positional Astronomy) from 1976 to 1979. A talented pianist, Tucker took a leading part in organizing and performing in staff entertainments. He was active in his local parish church, as a lay preacher and in playing the organ. For several years up to the time of his death he was treasurer of the charity Caring and Sharing, in the Chichester Diocese. His first wife, whom he married in 1950, died in 1994. He re-married in 1998 and is survived by his second wife, and two sons and a daughter from his first marriage.
C Andrew Murray. I am grateful to former colleagues N J P O'Hora and L V Morrison, and the RGO Archivist A J Perkins, for their assistance in compiling this obituary. |
| ||||||||||
| |||||||||||
| |||||||||||
| |||||||||||
|
Minoru Oda
Associate of the RAS, leader of Japanese space science, advocate and exemplar of UK–Japan collaboration. Minoru Oda was the first person from Japan that I knew. Our long, warm and productive relationship began in 1967, when I spent the summer working with Riccardo Giacconi's group at American Science and Engineering and Dr Oda was with George Clark at MIT. Space science was still a very young subject, of course, and many scientific collaborations were just beginning. However, I believe I was Minoru's first link with the UK space community, a connection that was later to lead to a major collaboration between our two island nations. The 1960s was a time of great excitement in X-ray astronomy, with research groups from the USA, Japan, Europe (and Australia) using the new sub-orbital research rockets to search the sky for additions to the handful of unexpectedly powerful cosmic X-ray sources still carrying the names of the host constellation. A major issue at the time, as subsequently with gamma-ray bursters, was identification. There, Minoru made an early and crucial contribution with the development of the modulation collimator, a technique yielding X-ray source positions of much improved precision. The resulting success in identifying Cygnus X-1 with a blue supergiant star led naturally to Oda's extended interest in that unique object. I suspect the early achievement of Japan's first space science satellite, Hakucho, launched in 1979 and led by Prof. Oda, was driven by his determination to further explore such remarkable cosmic phenomena. Viewed from the UK, the Japanese space science programme that rapidly developed under Minoru's leadership, based first at Tokyo University and later at the Institute for Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), was both familiar and enviable. The familiarity was in the approach, in which space experiments were designed and built by university researchers in their own laboratories. That approach contrasted with the much larger programmes in the USA and the Soviet Union. What increasingly we envied was the growth in funding in Japan, and particularly the independent launcher capability available to Japanese researchers. With hindsight the stage was well set, following our separate successes with Ariel 5 and 6, and with Hakucho and Tenma, for the first Japan–UK collaboration in X-ray astronomy, GINGA. ASTRO-C was an ambitious project, aiming to orbit an X-ray detector array an order of magnitude larger than anything previously attempted in Japan or Europe, and comparable to the large NASA HEAO-1 mission. With the substantial, but much smaller resources at ISAS, Minoru made the case to explore assistance from outside Japan. Happily for us in the UK, he decided our experience in building X-ray detectors for the Ariel satellites and EXOSAT was relevant and I was invited to visit Tokyo with senior officials from the UK Science Research Council in 1979. From the start, the relationship was a happy one, the collaboration building readily on the mutual trust and regard from both sides. The outcome – as they say – is history, with ASTRO-C being re-named as GINGA following a successful launch in February 1987 and going on to enjoy four near-flawless years as the major source of X-ray data for astronomers worldwide until re-entry in 1991. In addition to the scientific impact of GINGA, the collaboration was widely referenced in the UK and Japan as a model of international co-operation. A longer-lasting benefit resulted from the exchange of scientists, particularly students, between our two countries, forming links that continue to underpin new joint endeavours today. Recalling the importance Minoru placed on encouraging an outward-looking approach in Japanese science, I know he will have judged the latter benefit to be as important as the direct scientific returns from GINGA. Humility is a measure of true greatness and Minoru had this gift in full. During the early studies of Cygnus X-1, when a key target was to find a characteristic period in the X-ray emission, one of Minoru's students – who shall be nameless – produced a light curve from random data. As the supervisor examined the data, suggesting a period was indeed apparent, the truth was revealed. Minoru stood back, smiled and said that his student had taught him a lesson he would not forget. Those of us fortunate enough to have really known Minoru will recall many happy memories, and our own valuable lessons, from that association. He is greatly missed. Ken Pounds 
Minoru Oda |
| ||||||||||
| |||||||||||
| |||||||||||
| |||||||||||
|
Deaths of Fellows
Prof. Sir Robert BoydBorn 19 October 1922Elected 12 February 1960Died 5 February 2004 Mr G W CreightonBorn 15 December 1907Elected 14 February 1969 Prof. J A Jacobs (Associate)Born 13 April 1916Elected 12 January 1951Died 13 December 2003 Dr E M PuchnarewiczBorn 8 August 1964Elected 11 January 1991Died December 2003 |
| ||||||||||
| |||||||||||
| |||||||||||
| |||||||||||
|
Notes for authors submitting to A&G
Astronomy & Geophysics is published by the Royal Astronomical Society. It is a journal for the publication of serious scientific articles of interest to a broad range of astronomers and geophysicists. We are especially seeking Review Articles. We want lively, topical summaries of active research areas, giving readers a chance to keep up with developments in research fields outside their own. Such articles are normally around 6000 words, plus figures, to make six published pages. You should introduce material at a level comprehensible to a graduate in the subject, but should not limit discussion to this level. The Editor reserves the right to reject material that is unsuitable. It is helpful if articles are provided in electronic form; we use Word on Apple Macintosh. Other word processor files, TeX and LaTeX are also acceptable. The Editor can supply details of our ftp submission site. All submissions should be accompanied by a paper copy or pdf files of the text and figures, without which papers cannot be processed. All files should be labelled with the author's name (not “A&G text” or similar). The edited text is sent to authors for approval as page proofs; corrections and changes must be returned promptly. Illustrations are welcome but not essential and suggestions for cover images are always welcome. The Editor has discretion over which illustrations to use: the criteria are content, quality and suitability. Authors in any doubt should consult the Editor. Contact All contributions should be sent to Dr Sue Bowler, Editor, Astronomy & Geophysics, Dept of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK. s.bowler@leeds.ac.uk. |
| ||||||||||
| |||||||||||
| top of page |
