Waltraut Seitter

Waltraud Seitter ( born January 13, 1930 in Zwickau, † 15 November, 2007 Schalkenmehren ) was a German astronomer.

Waltraud Carola Seitter was born in 1930 in Zwickau, where her father was an engineer at the Horch -Werke. She went to school in Cologne, where they - in addition to working as a streetcar, Refugee assistant and technical illustrator - 1949 Abitur and then took up the study of physics, mathematics, chemistry and astronomy. A Fulbright scholarship took to Smith College, Northampton (Massachusetts), where in 1955, after the acquisition of the Master of Arts in Physics Instructor for Astronomy was. From 1958 to 1962 she worked at the Observatory Hoher List Observatory of the University of Bonn. After her graduation in 1962 she was made ​​two years research associate and assistant in Bonn, before she was appointed in 1965 to the Observer (1969 Hauptobservator and adjunct professor ) at the University of Bonn. In 1967 she was a visiting professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville (Tennessee), then as a full professor at Smith College (1973 Eliza Appleton Haven professor of astronomy ). In 1975 she was appointed as Professor and Director of the Astronomical Institute of the University of Münster, which she ran until her retirement in 1995. She was the first woman who held a chair of astronomy in Germany.

In Bonn, she worked on problems of stellar statistics and the spectral classification of stars, which mainly take the two parts of the Bonn Spektralatlas testimony, as well as eruptive stars. In Münster, in addition to teaching was moving into a new building with improving infrastructure in the foreground. But as soon as the foundation was laid, let concentration of the Ministry of Science and Research NRW, where the university and department, if was at all, only half-heartedly countered, the research on a grueling hunt for financial and personnel support. She managed a talented and motivated team of graduate students to rally, and the Institute experienced never before achieved bloom. Numerous articles about the supported by the German Research Foundation Muenster Redshift Project for large-scale distribution of galaxies and galaxy surveys of the southern sky bear witness to it. The first indications of the action of the cosmological constant were placed in a work submitted in early 1997 before the discovery of the following year with the necessary publicity of U.S. scientists has been announced.

Waltraud Seitter lived and worked tirelessly for astronomy and for her care students and staff. In 1980 she organized a meeting of the Astronomical Society in Münster, 1993 an international conference in the framework of the NATO Advanced Study Institute. From 1990 to 1996 it belonged to the editorial team of the magazine at the stars. After her retirement, she found an opportunity to pursue some of her work in the United States and Chile.

According to her, the asteroid ( 4893 ) Seitter was named.

Since 1975, she was married to the astronomers Hilmar W. Duerbeck.

Works

• Two color charts and questions of stellar statistics, 1962
• Bonner Spectral Atlas I, II, 1970.1975
• Large-scale structures in the universe: observational and analytical methods, 1988
• Cosmological aspects of X -ray clusters of galaxies, 1994