William Hammond Wright

William Hammond Wright ( * November 4, 1871 in San Francisco; † 16 May 1959 San José ) was an American astronomer.

Life

After graduating with a bachelor's degree at the University of California in 1893 and stays at the University of Chicago and University of California in 1897 he auxiliary astronomer at the Lick Observatory. From 1903 to 1906 he built up a South Station of the Observatory at Cerro San Cristobal near Santiago de Chile, equipped with a reflecting telescope with a 93 cm primary mirror diameter. In only nine months, he began with observations of this new observatory, from which he won many radial velocity measurements Southern Star. In 1908 he was promoted to astronomers. 1918 to 1919 he worked at the test site in Aberdeen ( Maryland) for the ammunition department of the United States Army. He then returned to the Lick Observatory back where he worked until his retirement and was its director from 1935 to 1942.

Wright is known for his determinations of radial velocities of stars in our Milky Way, and his work with a self-designed spectrograph. He won spectra of novae and nebulae in which he previously certain wavelengths and intensities of unknown spectral lines. In 1924, he concluded from photographic images at different wavelengths a thickness of 100 km for the Martian atmosphere. A project, also to use positions of galaxies in a photographic survey as a reference for positions and proper motions of stars, did not come to a conclusion.

Honors

A lunar crater ( Wright ( crater) ) and a Martian crater named after Wright.