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Charlotte Emma Moore Sitterly: She “turned chaos into order”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2024

David H. DeVorkin
David H. DeVorkin*
Affiliation:
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
*
email: devorkind@si.edu
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Abstract

At the 1988 IAU General Assembly in Baltimore, among many who offered reminiscences of earlier meetings was Charlotte Moore Sitterly. She first attended the 1932 GA meeting, in Cambridge, Mass., though she already “helped to assemble material for delegates” since the 1920s, for astronomers at Princeton, Mount Wilson and Lick Observatory. She was an ardent member of the new Commission 14 (then called “Fundamental Spectroscopic Data”), eventually becoming its president. In her 1988 reminiscence, she recalled that the Commission meeting was sparsely attended and very informal, but astronomers’ “never-ending demand for tables and data analysis” soon changed all that (Sitterly 1988). Here we provide a brief overview of how Charlotte Moore Sitterly came to be at the very center of that change, which Donald Menzel early on described as having “turned chaos into order” and just a “little short of miraculous” (Menzel 1928) We will recount highlights of her early life, aspirations, training, and contributions during her years at Princeton, Berkeley, Mount Wilson, and the National Bureau of Standards.

Keywords

history and philosophy of astronomyobituariesbiographiesmethods: laboratory
Type
Contributed Paper
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 18 , Symposium S371: Honoring Charlotte Moore Sitterly: Astronomical Spectroscopy in the 21st Century , August 2022 , pp. 3 - 11
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Astronomical Union

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