Biographical Memoirs Volume 85 (2004) / Chapter Skim
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Albert Edward Whitford
Albert Edward Whitford
Pages 336-363
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California, of University Observatory, Lick the of Archives Shane Lea Mary the of Cruz Courtesy Santa
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As a graduate student in physics he developed instrumental improvements that greatly increased the sensitivity of photoelectric measurements of the brightness and color of stars. For the rest of his life he applied these and later even better tools for increasing our knowledge and understanding of stars, interstellar matter, star clusters, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies, from the nearest to the most distant.
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But, he had done very good work and opened up a new field for himself along the way. In 1929 at the start of his fourth year at Madison, Whitford learned that Joel Stebbins, the professor of astronomy and director of the university's Washburn Observatory, was looking for a physics graduate student assistant.
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Stebbins could keep him a year as an assistant on the same job he had held as a graduate student, and was eager to do so. The older man, a highly creative research scientist and an excellent observer, was a tyro in electronics.
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He began designing and building better amplifiers and cold boxes for the photometers in the stringand-sealing-wax type shop he had inherited in the basement of the old Washburn Observatory. In 1932 planning for the 200-inch telescope was well underway in Pasadena, under the leadership of George Ellery Hale, who had secured the funds necessary to build it from the Rockefeller Foundation.
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("Willy") Fowler, then a boisterous, outgoing physics graduate student, always the center of mischief and pranks designed to disturb the calm quiet that permeated the club but a star experimental student in the lab.
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In 1937 Whitford married Eleanor Whitelaw, whom he had first met as the sister of one of his fellow physics graduate students at Wisconsin, Neil Whitelaw. Born in Desoto, Kansas, she was a graduate of nearby Park College (Missouri)
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When the war ended, Whitford was tempted by a job offer from Los Alamos, and then by a faculty position at Purdue University, both in physics, but by then he had become an astronomer, he finally decided.
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Thus, comparing stars with the same intrinsic spectrum, the reddened one is the one whose light has passed through more interstellar matter containing dust, and the bluer is the one whose light has passed through less of it. Very nearby stars with no dust between them and us show their intrinsic colors, which are also the intrinsic colors of other stars "just like" them, that is, stars of the same spectral type.
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This "Whitford interstellar absorption curve" was used by astronomers studying galactic structure and the nature of interstellar dust for decades, until it was extended by new results in the ultraviolet spectral region obtained from orbiting telescopes above the Earth's atmosphere. Whitford was aware of a few anomalous regions in which the extinction was somewhat different, and mentioned them also.
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Baade favored setting up standard magnitude sequences to faint levels in a few of the more conveniently placed Selected Areas, defined originally by J
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With the new amplifier Whitford had developed they could easily measure fairly bright galaxies. Whitford, who stayed in Pasadena most of the time from 1933 to 1935, measured the nearest, brightest galaxies on his own at Mount Wilson, using its photometer mounted on a 10-inch refractor, which was only infrequently used by other observers and thus usually available to him.
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After World War II Whitford concentrated more on galaxies and interstellar extinction with their new six-color photometric system, while Stebbins, approaching retirement, concentrated more on nearby stars and Cepheid variables. Together they found that E, Sa, and Sb galaxies tended to be brighter in both the ultraviolet and infrared spectral regions than G dwarf stars with similar colors in the blue and visual regions, and interpreted it as resulting naturally from a mixture of stars with all colors.
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Code, who had replaced Johnson on the UW faculty in 1951, had built a one-channel scanning photoelectric spectrometer for use on the Mount Wilson telescopes, and with it Code obtained a scan of M 32, the nearby bright elliptical galaxy companion of M 31. Numerically redshifting this scan, which showed the discontinuities and absorption features in the near ultraviolet region, Whitford saw that it reproduced the observational data well.
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It would replace the antiquated 15.6-inch refractor on Observatory Hill, which he had regarded as a relic ever since he first saw it as a graduate student in 1929. At this conference Whitford also agreed (and in fact strongly favored)
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Stebbins had resisted integrating it into the college, preferring to keep it as his own independent research base, but Whitford realized that teaching more undergraduates and training graduate students in a regular program were important parts of a university and would lead to increased support. Whitford, given the go-ahead by Fred, assigned Ted Houck, then a graduate student, soon to become Wisconsin's third Ph.D.
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He had recommended Whitford strongly for the directorship. At Lick Whitford took hold immediately, plunged into the details of the telescope construction and optics, and got rid of one highly placed engineer.
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Astronomers trusted his judgment. In the 1950s, as one of the few Midwestern astronomers with a proven big-telescope research record, he played a leading role in the conferences and discussions that resulted in the founding of Kitt Peak National Observatory, later to become the nucleus of the National Optical Astronomical Observatories.
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Whitford, however, knew it was his duty to lead them to the campus and he did so in his businesslike way, assigning duties in planning the move to each of the senior staff members. A few of them left Lick Observatory and the University of California at that time, a few others grumbled but gave in, and the rest looked forward to being on a campus with professors in other fields and undergraduate students to teach.
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He and Kenneth Thimann, another National Academy of Sciences member and a plant biologist from Harvard, gave Santa Cruz a start and a big push toward frontier research in physical and biological sciences, which has continued and strengthened over the years. At Wisconsin Whitford had taught hundreds of undergraduate students in elementary astronomy survey courses, but only a very few graduate students, in one-on-one "reading" or "research" courses: Eggen (who was largely Stebbins's student)
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The Lick astronomers were isolated from almost all of these on Mount Hamilton; at Santa Cruz Whitford did his best to shield them from it. He was their leader who negotiated for them with the campus and university-wide administrators, and was gradually ground down in these struggles.
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He lived on in Santa Cruz, still coming to the campus daily and working on stellar populations until 1996. That year a symposium on stellar populations was held in his honor at Santa Cruz, under the redwoods outside Kerr Hall, where he and all the other astronomers' offices were then located.
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The Whitford interstellar extinction "law" and the Whitford report are his best-known legacies to us. THIS BIOGRAPHICAL memoir is based mainly on Whitford's published scientific papers, and on many letters to, from, or about him in the University of Wisconsin Archives, Madison, and in the Mary Lea Shane Archives of the Lick Observatory, University Library, University of California, Santa Cruz.
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Graves and Martha W Barss, provided additional biographical details at my request, and several faculty colleagues who had known him at Madison, Santa Cruz, or Mount Wilson made helpful suggestions or comments on earlier drafts of this memoir.
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The magnitudes of the thirty brightest stars of the North Polar Sequence. Astrophys.
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155:899-912. 1971 Absolute energy curves and K-corrections for giant elliptical galaxies.
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274:723-732. 1986 The stellar population of the galactic nuclear bulge.
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