Frank Elmore Ross

Frank Elmore Ross ( born April 2, 1874 in San Francisco, USA, † September 21, 1960 in Altadena ( California)) was an American astronomer and physicist.

Ross received his doctorate in 1901 at the University of California. In 1905 he became director of a station of the International Latitude Observatory in Gaithersburg, Maryland. From 1915 he worked as a physicist at the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York. In 1924 he took a position at the Yerkes Observatory, where he worked until his retirement in 1939.

In 1905 he was able to calculate the orbit of Saturn's moon Phoebe. Later he determined the orbits of the moons of Jupiter and Elara Himalia. During his tenure at Eastman Kodak, he developed photographic emulsions and wide-angle lenses for astronomical applications.

At the Yerkes Observatory he was the successor of Edward Emerson Barnard and took over his collection of photographic plates. Ross decided to repeat Barnard's recording series and to compare the plates by blink comparator. In this way he discovered over 400 variable stars and more than 1,000 stars with high proper motion. Some of these high-speed, like Ross 154, turned out to be neighbors of the sun.

During the opposition of Mars in 1926, he photographed the planet with the 1.5 m telescope of the Mount Wilson Observatory, with different color filters began. The following year, he returned to ultraviolet photographs of Venus, which structures in the dense cloud cover of the planet were visible for the first time.

In his memory, the lunar crater after him, Ross and James Clarke Ross and Ross Mars crater named after him.