William Henry Pickering

William Henry Pickering (* February 15, 1858 in Boston, † January 17, 1938 in Mandeville, Jamaica ) was an American astronomer.

He devoted himself mainly to the planets and moons of the solar system - unlike his brother Edward Charles Pickering (1846-1919) at Harvard who was known by researching variable stars.

In 1891 he built with his brother in Arequipa, Peru, an astronomical observatory. In 1894 he built another for Percival Lowell in Flagstaff, Arizona - which soon became famous Lowell Observatory. In Peru in 1898, he discovered photographically Phoebe, the ninth moon of Saturn, and recognized its declining orbit around the planet. In 1905 he announced the discovery of a tenth of Saturn's moons known, which he called " Themis ". This but later turned out to be non-existent. William Pickering analyzed perturbations of Neptune because he suspected an outside circular Trans Neptune, and said 1919 its existence with position indication ahead. He contributed to some extent to the discovery of "Planet X" ( Pluto).

Additional research topics Pickering were formations and craters analyzes of the Moon, photometry, meteor swarms and the chemical composition of meteorites. He also led a ten -point rating scale for the assessment of air turbulence on (" Pickering scale ").

Known books by him are " The Moon" (1903) and "Mars" ( 1921). In 1909 he was awarded the Jules Janssen Award. The lunar crater Pickering is named after him and his brother Edward Charles Pickering, as is the asteroid ( 784 ) Pickeringia. The Mars crater Pickering is named after the brothers and the New Zealand rocket engineer William Hayward Pickering.