Henry Draper

Henry Draper ( born March 7, 1837 Prince Edward County, Virginia; † November 20, 1882 in New York City ) was an American physiologist and astronomer. He was a pioneer of spectroscopy and namesake of the Henry Draper Catalogue.

Life

Draper helped already as a boy his father ( John William Draper ) in the taking of photographs of microscopic preparations for a textbook. He studied medicine and in 1861 professor of physiology and analytical chemistry at the University of New York. In 1867 he married Mary Anna, born in Palmer.

Since early youth he used astronomy as a hobby and was a pioneer of astrophotography and spectrography. In 1857 he visited on a trip to Europe, the private observatory of Lord Rosse in Ireland with the 72 -inch telescope. The following year, he began the manufacture of a specially constructed for celestial photography reflecting telescope with a 40 cm diameter. This development work in a private observatory on the property of his father was with the support of his brother Daniel. His detailed description of the manufacture of optics ( a silvered glass mirror ) and Mount appeared in 1865 at the Smithsonian Institution and became a standard work for opticians. 1870 Draper built an even larger telescope.

After a hunting trip in the Rocky Mountains, on which he had caught a cold, he died unexpectedly at the height of his career.

Services as an astronomer

In addition to his - very successful - main occupation as a physiologist, he made groundbreaking as an astronomer:

He photographed in 1872 as the first successful a star's spectrum, the Vega ( Alpha Lyrae ). In 1880 he succeeded first scheduling to photograph a nebula ( Orion Nebula ). The construction of the Gitterspektrografen come from him. Draper was also able to prove the element hydrogen on the sun.

Other firsts related to the spectrogram of a comet and a wide angle shot of the entire comet tail ( comet Tebbutt 1881 ), further spectrograms of the moon and the planets Venus, Mars and Jupiter, and finally from the Orion Nebula. In its day, driven by a mechanical clockwork mechanism for tracking of the telescope was strongly improved by him. Thus the heavens recordings were possible with exposure times of about three hours. He also published monographs on spectrography and telescope designs in journals.

His widow donated the Harvard Observatory, a considerable part of their heritage ( " Henry Draper Memorial Fund "). This completes the publication of a comprehensive star catalog ( nine volumes, 1918-1925 ) was financed. This was created by Annie Cannon and Edward C. Pickering and lists over 350,000 stars with their spectral classes on.

Named after Draper are the " Draper classification " of the stellar spectra, the Henry Draper Catalogue, the Henry Draper Medal for outstanding achievements in the field of astrophysics and the lunar crater Draper.