Born Stockholm, Sweden, 27 March 1903
Died Lund, Sweden, 17 June 1988
Yngve Öhman, the founder of Swedish solar astronomy, designed, built, and used the first narrow‐band interference filter (the birefringent quartz polarizing monochromator) useful for monitoring solar activity. The son of Karl E. and Ida (née) Cassel Öhman, he saw comet 1P/Halley at age seven and built a small telescope by 17. Öhman began studies at Uppsala University in 1922, receiving a Ph.D. in 1930 for work with Bertil Lindblad on luminosities and distances of stars. Other important early influences at Uppsala were Östen Bergstrand, Hugo von Zeipel, and Knut Lundmark. The thesis work was done partly with spectrograms taken at the Mount Wilson Observatory, California, by Milton Humason and Paul Merrilland brought back to Sweden by Lindblad. Öhman recognized that the spectral absorption features due to CaH at 6365 Å and to neutral calcium at 4227 Å were much stronger in dwarf stars than in giants of the same...
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Selected References
Bernhard, Carl Gustaf (1989). The Research Station for Astrophysics Capri and La Palma. Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Elvius, Aina (1989–1990). “Yngve Öhman.” Kungliga Fysiografiska Sällskapet i Lund Arsbok: 111–116.
Hearnshaw, John B. (1986). The Analysis of Starlight: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Astronomical Spectroscopy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Holmberg, Gustav (1999). Reaching for the Stars: Studies in the History of Swedish Stellar and Nebular Astronomy, 1860–1940. Lund: Lund University.
Hufbauer, Karl (1991). Exploring the Sun: Solar Science since Galileo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Stenflo, Jan‐Olof. Interview with author.
Wyller, Arne E. (1989). “Ohman, Yngve (1903–1988).” Solar Physics 119: 1–3.
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Holmberg, G. (2007). Öhman, K. Yngve. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_1025
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