Heber Doust Curtis

Heber D. Curtis eventually became famous for his role in astronomy's "Great Debate" with Harlow Shapley in which Curtis argued that what astronomers called spiral nebulae were actually spiral galaxies outside our own Milky Way. Before we leap to science fame, we had simpler beginnings as a graduate student at the University of Virginia's Leander McCormick Observatory.

Curtis was born on June 27, 1872 in Muskegon, Michigan, the son of a one-armed Union veteran named Orson Blair Curtis and his wife Sarah Eliza Doust. His early education had little to do with astronomy. He attended Detroit High School and went on to the University of Michigan. He studied there for three years to receive his Bachelor of Arts degree and another year to receive his Master of Arts degree, both in classical languages. In his four years at the University of Michigan, he never stepped foot into the observatory there.

Upon graduation he returned to Detroit High School as a Latin instructor and six months later moved to Napa College, a small Methodist institution near San Francisco, where he taught Latin and Greek. He discovered astronomy as a hobby there with Napa College's small refracting telescope.

In 1895, he married Mary D. Raper and they went on to have four children. In 1896, Napa College merged with the College of the Pacific in San Jose and in the next year Curtis switched to become a professor of mathematics and astronomy. Curtis spent the summers of 1897 and 1898 at the Lick Observatory to further his astronomical studies and returned to the University of Michigan in the summer of 1899 to study celestial mechanics.

In 1900, Curtis attended the eclipse in Georgia as part of the Lick expedition. There, astronomers from other institutions, including the University of Virginia, encouraged Curtis to attend graduate school at UVa. That fall, Curtis, with his wife and two small children, moved to Charlottesville, where he studied as a Vanderbilt fellow under Ormond Stone. Curtis and his family managed to get by with only his fellowship to live on and his wife later remarked to McCormick Observatory director Samuel Mitchell that their days at Virginia were "the happiest of their lives."

He received his Ph.D. from UVa in 1902 and the Lick Observatory immediately hired him, where he stayed for the next eighteen years. While at Lick Observatory, he composed his paper on spiral galaxies. It was the presentation of that paper, before the National Academy of Sciences in 1920, that erupted into a debate with Harlow Shapley now known as the "Great Debate." Edwin Hubble would later prove Curtis's theories correct.

In 1920, Curtis left the Lick Observatory for the University of Pittsburgh to serve as the director of the Allegheny Observatory. Unfortunately, the growing industrialization in Pittsburgh proved detrimental to astronomical observation. In 1930, Curtis returned to the University of Michigan one more time to serve as the director of its observatory.

Sadly, Curtis spent much of his last years suffering from a severe thyroid disease and he passed away in Ann Arbor on June 9, 1942. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and remembered as a well respected astronomer.

Charles P. Oliver

"The University of Virginia at the time the Observatory was founded had only 200 or 300 students in all departments, and no complete graduate school as it is now understood. The faculty was very small and rather homogeneous, and the student body was even more so. Charlottesville was a town of about 5,000 people with some 30 or 40 percent of these negroes. Neither the town nor the state had recovered from the ravages of the War Between the States, and the poverty of most people, white and negro alike, was extreme. There was no appreciable industry in the town. The only things that were cheap and abundant were food and labor. It was in such an environment that the Observatory, and my own personal involvement with it began."

These are the words the Charles P. Olivier used to begin his historical narrative of the time he spent working at the Leander McCormick Observatory. Olivier grew up in a large brick house at 1021 West Main Street in Charlottesville, just a five minute walk from the eastern entrance to the University Grounds. His parents knew members of the faculty and their wives. Ormond Stone, the observatory's first director, served on the vestry with Olivier's father at Christ Episcopal Church. Stone set Olivier up on his first assignment with the observatory assisting a cameraman for the Leonids meteor shower of 1899, which turned out to be a tragic disappointment.

As a family friend, Stone took on Olivier in 1901 as a part-time assistant and live-in at the Stone's home on Mount Jefferson beside the observatory. In 1905, Olivier began his official work at the observatory as a Vanderbilt fellow. At that point he moved into the observatory's small living quarters and lived there until 1909, as well as for six months in 1911. In 1911 He received his Ph.D. in Astronomy. Upon receiving his Ph.D., he was given an appointment as professor of physics & astronomy as Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, where he served from 1912-1914.

Olivier was serving as a volunteer summer staff member at the Yerkes Observatory in 1913 when he encountered Samuel Mitchell. They had met previously in 1905 at the United States Naval Observatory Eclipse Expedition camp in Daroca, Spain. Mitchell had just accepted the position as the new director of the McCormick Observatory and questioned Olivier about conditions at UVA. Upon arriving in Charlottesville, Mitchell realized that the observatory was in desperate need of funds and staff. He contacted Olivier and convinced him to return to UVA as an assistant professor, beginning in June 1914. Mitchell received the Ernest Kempton Adams research fellowship from Columbia University of $1250 in July, which allowed him to hire Olivier and Harold Alden to the observatory staff to begin work on a parallax program.

On his return to Charlottesville, Olivier spent a year living with the Mitchells in the director's house (now known as Alden House). Mitchell was able to get a renewal of the fellowship to keep Olivier and Alden on staff for another year while he sought alternative means of funding their positions. Olivier and Mitchell each worked four nights a week while other assistants worked three nights a week, keeping the telescope busy seven nights a week. Parallax measurements could not be taken around midnight, so Olivier began a micrometer measurement of double stars program.

Alden and Olivier were running the telescope in June 1918 when a star in Aquila went nova. They immediately took parallax measurements of it and informed the press, admitting that people in Europe had probably seen it before them. Though they were correct about not being the first to notice the nova, the press credited them with its discovery and the first measurements of it, which they published in 1920 and 1921.

Shortly after the Aquilae nova, all the men at the observatory, except Mitchell, left to serve in the war effort.

After his service concluded, Olivier returned to his double star observations, assisting with the parallax program and began observing meteors. Having been promoted to associate professor, he spent nine months on leave with health difficulties in 1923 and 1924, but spent part of his time off doing research on meteors at the U. S. Naval Observatory. Olivier went on to become an expert on meteors, founder and president of the American Meteor Society, president of the Meteor Commission of the International Astronomical Union and in 1925 he published the authoritative work of the day on meteors, entitled (appropriately) Meteors. University of Virginia President Edwin A. Alderman congratulated Olivier on the success of his book and suggested to Olivier that he "ought to take pains to have your colleagues know, through the papers, of this handsome piece of work."

Olivier continued to be instrumental in the parallax program, having taken almost one-third of the parallax measurements in the first fourteen years of the program's existence at the University of Virginia. His work on meteors and double star measurements also lent scientific prestige to the University. After fourteen years as a professor, Olivier resigned his position on September 15, 1928 to become the director of the Flower Observatory (now the Flower and Cook Observatory) at the University of Pennsylvania.

Piet (Peter) van de Kamp

Piet van de Kamp, or Peter as he was called in America, arrived at the University of Virginia on March 1, 1923 from the Astronomical Laboratory of Groningen, Holland for a year's residence. His visit was made possible through grants from the Draper Fund of the National Academy of Sciences. He arrived at the Leander McCormick Observatory under the leadership of Samuel Mitchell and his extensive parallax program. In addition to assisting with the parallax program, van de Kamp assisted Harold Alden with the lengthy Boss star project. This proper motion work determined that systematic errors predicted by Kapteyn were only one-third the severity predicted and they published their results in 1924.

After one year at UVA, van de Kamp went to the Lick Observatory in California as a Kellogg fellow. There he received his Ph.D. from the University of California in Astronomy in June 1925. Meanwhile, back in Virginia, Alden resigned his position to go to Yale's observatory in South Africa. This left an open professorial position and a position on the McCormick observatory staff.

In March of 1925, Mitchell began making arrangements for van de Kamp to return to the University of Virginia. Van de Kamp returned October 1, 1925 to the title of Instructor and promised new living quarters. A small cottage beside the observatory already housed Alexander Vyssotsky and Michael S. Kovalenko, to which was added another bedroom and another bathroom. The McCormick family agreed to help pay for part of the addition along with the University.

His work consisted of assisting with the parallax program and continuing the proper motion work that he and Alden had begun. Van de Kamp and Vyssotsky spent eight years measuring 18,000 proper motions. He did additional, smaller projects individually, including an investigation for general and selective absorption of light within the galaxy. In 1928, he received a promotion from instructor to assistant professor.

Van de Kamp was also a very talented musician. He helped to organize the Observatory Mountain Orchestra (a precursor to the Charlottesville and University Symphony), which he conducted and included fellow astronomer Vyssotsky. He also composed music, both for the orchestra and for the piano. His unpublished "Lullaby" can be found at the Music Library at the University of Virginia.

In the spring of 1937, van de Kamp resigned his position at the Leander McCormick Observatory to take over as director of Swarthmore College's Sproul Observatory. Fortunately, he did not sever all ties with UVa. He returned on multiple occasions to deliver guest lectures and meet with old friends at the University. He attended the centennial celebration of the observatory held in 1985. (He is shown left speaking at that event and at the right with Ruth Gienow.)  He arranged the loaning of equipment from the Sproul Observatory to the University of Virginia when requested. He authored a biographical memoir of Harold Alden for the National Academy of Sciences. He also continued his love of music with the orchestra at Swarthmore College.

Caroyl Beddow Gooch

Full text and a video can be found on the Virginia Magazine website.

In 1942, at the age of 18, Caroyl Beddow Gooch began a job at UVA’s Leander McCormick Observatory, working alongside Observatory director Samuel Alfred Mitchell and several other internationally known astronomers. Gooch was one of the dozens of workers in the years from 1914 through the 1970s who calculated thousands of astronomical measurements by hand, before technology made their jobs unnecessary. Most of these workers were young women, and the astronomers referred to them as “computers.”

“The machines we used and the things I calculated have mostly left my head now, but I remember the people clearly,” Gooch says. “Dr. Mitchell was a dear, sweet man. And when Dr. [Rupert] Wildt [a German astronomer] first came to work here, he clicked his heels and bowed to me.”

The computers’ careful calculations helped McCormick Observatory become one of the top observatories in the world when it came to determining the distances between Earth and thousands of stars, until the launch of the Hipparcos satellite in 1989.

Mitchell was an international leader in studying stellar parallax—the relative motion of nearby stars against a backdrop of distant celestial objects. As the Earth orbits the Sun, nearby stars seem to shift, moving back and forth against a backdrop of distant celestial objects that appear stationary. Measuring those “shifts” allowed astronomers to determine distance between the Earth and those nearby stars.

Astronomers used the 26-inch lens of the Observatory’s telescope to gather the light from these faint stars. They then captured that starlight on glass photographic plates, and developed the images. Gooch and other computers examined those plates to measure stellar parallax.

In order to find the exact position of a star on a glass plate, the computers used astrometric machines such as the Gaertner Single Screw Measuring Engine, which carefully shifted plates until the star being measured was perfectly centered so that its position could then be recorded. The computers would use a blink comparator to compare plates of the same star taken months apart. Through the eyepiece of the machine, the computer could identify changes in the star’s position.

To ensure precision, each star’s position would be measured three times, often by different computers, and the results would be averaged. Between 1914 and 1995, UVA astronomers took 144,000 plates of the sky, and because of their expense, most of the plates were rotated and used multiple times. Not only did computers need to be precise in their measurements, they also had to navigate plates with different star images at various angles.

She worked at the Observatory from 1942 through 1945 and then moved on to what she says was her true calling—accounting. Remarkably, she brushes off the idea that the work she did as a computer required high intelligence. “If there was any intelligence, I missed it,” she jokes. And yet, when reminded of an observation she made in her work that led to Mitchell’s identification of a star with an unusual proper motion, her eyes twinkle. “I suppose I did help discover that,” she says.

“People looked at me kind of strangely when they asked what I did,” she adds, smiling. “I’d look them in the eyes and say, ‘I measure the stars.’”

Caroyl passed away peacefully on February 2, 2021. She was 97 years old. Caroyl was a lifelong resident of Charlottesville who grew up on Locust Avenue and graduated from Lane High School in 1938 when she was just 15 years old. She went on to have a fulfilling career working primarily in the field of accounting. After retirement, Caroyl stayed busy as a volunteer with her church and various other local charities.

Alexander Vyssotsky

The list of accomplishments in observational astronomy attributed to Alexander N. Vyssotsky is lengthy and impressive. In his 35 years of astronomical work at the University of Virginia he published countless works, with his best known probably being a catalog with five lists of stars entitled Dwarf M Stars Found Spectrophotometrically. The work for this book was done with a 10-inch prismatic camera to provide spectroscopic parallaxes comparing giant M and dwarf M stars. He helped to establish the time for one rotation of the Galaxy as 220 million years. He worked on galactic kinematics and dynamics, concentrating on the local Milky Way. He did extensive proper motion work and spent eight years photographing the whole northern sky. Vyssotsky’s story is much more impressive than just this list of accomplishments.

Vyssotsky was born May 23, 1888 in Moscow, Russia. He received his master’s degree at the University of Moscow and taught at the Pulkova Observatory until 1914. He served in the Czar’s army in World War I and became a lieutenant. He used his knowledge of French, English and German as a wireless operator to intercept messages of other armies. After the Russian Revolution, he fought with anticommunist White Army forces in southern Russia under General Denikin. From there he moved to Constantinople and then to Bizarte, Tunisia where he taught science to Russian refugees.

A note in a German astronomical journal helped lead Vyssotsky to a position at the University of Virginia in 1923. He arrived in September to begin helping with the Boss star project. He also assisted Olivier in measuring double stars on photographic plates. Over the next five to ten years, the proper motion and double star photography monopolized Vyssotsky’s time. It required eight years for Vyssotsky and Peter van de Kamp to complete the proper motion survey.

In 1929, he married fellow astronomer Emma T. R. Williams, who was from Philadelphia and of a Quaker descent. She worked with her husband as an astronomer at the McCormick Observatory until her retirement. They had one son, Victor A. (Vic) Vyssotsky, who went on to work as a mathematician and computer scientist at Bell Labs and later as the Director of the Cambridge Research Laboratory of the Digital Equipment Corporation. Vic is credited as one of the originators of Core Wars in August 1961 (though it was called Darwin at the time), which many years later unfortunately indirectly led to computer viruses. Vic was a member of the Triumvirate that managed the creation of MULTICS, a precursor to UNIX and LINUX. Vic coined the term process for MULTICS.

In 1928, Vyssotsky was promoted from instructor to assistant professor. He was promoted again, this time to associate professor, in 1937. In the mid-1930s, Vyssotsky began to record spectra of stars as faint as 12th magnitude using the 10-inch Cooke camera and objective prism, also referred to as the astrograph. The astrograph was a gift from Mount Wilson Observatory, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and the Carnegie Corporation. The project took twenty years to finish and required Vyssotsky to be the primary user of the 10-inch astrograph.

Vyssotsky also contributed astronomical work outside his spectral survey. In October 1939, he unintentionally obtained the first spectrum of a meteor, using the astrograph. His work on M-type stars began in the early 1940’s when he used the Cooke 10-inch and observed emission lines in the spectrum of a dwarf M-type star, which provoked further investigation. Starting in the early 1950’s, Vyssotsky worked in cooperation with the Harvard College Observatory to abstract papers from Russian astronomical journals. He also composed Russian abstracts for papers presented at American and International conferences.

Throughout his tenure at UVa., Vyssotsky gave guests lectures around the country and taught classes for undergraduate and graduate students. He attended several meetings of the International Astronomical Union around the world. He participated in American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings. In the mid-1950’s he presented a paper at a conference on the Cosmic Distance Scale. He also went to the 1957 conference on galactic system structure in Stockholm, Sweden as one of only ten Americans in attendance.

Vyssotsky was also well respected for his participation in the University of Virginia community. He played violin in fellow astronomer Piet van de Kamp’s Observatory Mountain Orchestra and sat first chair. He collected the extensive collection of Leander McCormick Observatory Papers from 1920 to 1945 and contributed them to the Special Collections of Alderman Library at UVA. In December 1953, he was honored by election to the Raven Society, a select society at the University of Virginia.

Vyssotsky retired on June 30, 1958 after 35 years on UVa’s faculty. The vacancy produced by his retirement was not filled immediately, putting an end to Vyssotsky’s lengthy proper motion and astrometry programs. Vyssotsky died on December 31, 1973 in Winter Park, Florida at the age of 85. He was survived by his wife, Emma, and their son Victor.

The Department has an award named after him, the Vyssotsky Prize, which recognizes an outstanding undergraduate student in their third year of study. The Vyssotsky Prize consists of a certificate and a $1,000 fund for professional travel during the student's 4th year, such as an observing trip, or a presentation at a conference.

Emma T. R. Williams

Emma T. R. Williams Vyssotsky was born on October 23, 1894 in Pennsylvania. She earned her bachelor's degree in mathematics at Swarthmore College in 1916, after which she worked at Smith College as an astronomy and math demonstrator for a year. She later worked as an actuary before enrolling as a PhD student at Radcliffe College (a women's college now a part of Harvard). She earned her PhD in astronomy in 1930. During her time as a student, she worked at the Harvard College Observatory from around 1927 to about 1930. She married Alexander Vyssotsky in 1929.

After finishing her degree, they moved to Charlottesville to work at the McCormick Observatory, where Vyssotsky was a professor and Williams was an instructor. Her research on stellar photometry, stellar spectroscopy, parallax, and solar motion and the kinematics of the Milky Way contributed greatly to the work at the McCormick Observatory. She was promoted to professor in 1945, and in 1946, she was awarded the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy by the American Astronomical Society, in recognition of her work in the field of stellar spectra. Williams and Vyssotsky had one son, Victor A. Vyssostky, who when on to be a mathematician and computer scientist.

The Department of Astronomy has an award named after, the Emma T.R. Williams Prize, which recognizes an outstanding graduate student in their fourth year of study.

Timothy P. McCullough, Jr.

McCullough, who was principally a radio astronomer, published 22 scientific research papers while working in the Atmosphere and Astrophysics Division of NRL, from 1946 until his retirement in 1975.

He spent the early part of his career in planetary observation and was among the first in his field to use radio astronomy to measure the surface temperature of Venus. He also studied Mars and Jupiter. Later, his interest turned to supernovas, galaxies and solar flares.

He was an emeritus member of the American Astronomical Society and a member of the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society.

McCullough was born on 9 December 1910 in Vardaman, Mississippi. His father, Timothy P. McCullough, was a farmer and bookkeeper. His mother, Annie W. McCullough, was a homemaker. Timothy McCullough, Jr.'s parents, as well as two sisters and a brother, are deceased.

McCullough graduated from the University of Mississippi in Oxford in 1936 and received a master's degree in physics from North Carolina State University in Raleigh. He taught physics and aviation navigation before entering the Navy during World War II. He instructed Russian sailors on anti-submarine warfare. McCullough left the Navy at the end of the war, but continued to serve in the Naval Reserve.

He was recalled to active duty during the Korean War and was stationed at Potomac River Naval Command, where he wrote technical documents on electronic warfare systems.

McCullough retired from the Naval Reserve in 1969 with the rank of commander. He was a charter member of First Baptist Church in Springfield and a former deacon and Sunday school teacher at First Baptist Church in Alexandria.

Timothy Pendleton McCullough Jr., 93, a retired research physicist who was a pioneer in the measurement of microwave radiation from planetary surfaces, died of cardiac arrest on 19 November 2004, at Inova Fairfax Hospital. He lived in Springfield, VA.

The Department has named an award after him, The McCullough Scholarship Prize, which recognizes an outstanding undergraduate student in their second year. The scholarship was established by his son, Gene McCullough, who is a UVA alumnus, graduating with a degree in Physics and being in the first contingent of Echols Scholars at UVA.

D. Nelson Limber

Nelson D. Limber received both AB and MSc degrees in physics from Ohio State University in 1950, and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Chicago in 1953.

Limber held a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton in 1953 and had been appointed to the faculties of the University of Rochester (1956) and the University of Chicago (1958) before returning to Virginia to join the department of astronomy at the University of Virginia in 1968.

Throughout his career, Limber concentrated on problems of stellar function and dynamics, taking particular interest in analyzing stars with extended gaseous envelopes.

D. Nelson Limber Memorial Observatory was founded in the summer of 1979 in the Texas Hill Country near San Antonio as a private observatory and residence.

The Department has an award named after him, the D. Nelson Limber Award, which recognizes outstanding accomplishments in course work and astrophysical research by a graduating undergraduate major(s).