Born Edgerton, Wisconsin, USA, 24 January 1882
Died Pasadena, California, USA, 8 April 1965
American laboratory and stellar spectroscopist Harold D. Babcock produced very high‐quality ruled gratings for spectrometers and used them (in collaboration with his son, Horace Babcock) to map out the magnetic fields of the Sun and stars with great precision. Babcock was the son of the owner of a general store and received his early education in the public schools of Wisconsin. He completed an additional 4 years of secondary school in Los Angeles after the family moved there in 1896, acquiring a good grounding in science, languages, and the arts. It was during this time that he also began private experimental work, particularly radio, and developed a fascination that led to his enrolling in electrical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley in 1901. Babcock quickly decided, however, that his principal interests lay in physics – especially spectroscopy – and he...
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Selected References
Babcock, H. D. (1933). “The Construction and Characteristics of Some Diffraction Gratings. ” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 45: 283.
——— (1953). “What's in the Air?” Astronomical Society of the Pacific Leaflet, no. 291.
——— (1959). “The Sun's Polar Magnetic Field.” Astrophysical Journal 130: 364–365.
Babcock, H. D. and H. W. Babcock (1951). “The Ruling of Diffraction Gratings at the Mount Wilson Observatory.” Journal of the Optical Society of America 41: 776–786.
Babcock, H. D. and R. T. Birge (1931). “Precision Determination of the Mass Ratio of Oxygen 18 and 16.” Physical Review 37: 233. (Paper abstract.)
Babcock, H. W. and H. D. Babcock (1952). “Mapping the Magnetic Fields of the Sun.” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 64: 282–287.
——— (1955). “The Sun' s Magnetic Field, 1952–1954.” Astrophysical Journal 121: 349–366.
Bowen, Ira S. (1974). “Harold Delos Babock.” Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences 45: 1–19. (Additional material by H. W. Babcock.)
Dieke, G. H. and H. D. Babcock (1927). “The Structure of the Atmospheric Absorption Bands of Oxygen.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 13: 670–678.
Hearnshaw, J. B. (1990). The Analysis of Starlight: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Astronomical Spectroscopy. 1st pbk. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kron, Gerald E. (1953). “The Award of the Bruce Gold Medal to Harold Delos Babcock.” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 65: 65–69.
Plaskett, H. H. (1969). “Harold D. Babcock.” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 10: 68–72.
St. John, Charles E. et al. (1928). Revision of Rowland's Preliminary Table of Solar Spectrum Wavelengths. Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication No. 396. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington.
Wright, Helen (1994). Explorer of the Universe: A Biography of George Ellery Hale. New York: AIP Press. (Reprinted with a new introduction by Allan Sandage.)
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Shore, S.N. (2007). Babcock, Harold Delos. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_88
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