BornLiverpool near Syracuse, New York, USA, 31 May 1861
DiedCambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 10 September 1931
Edward Skinner King was an American astronomer who spent his entire professional career at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he made important contributions to the techniques of photographic photometry of the brighter stars. He was one of the pioneers of the method of extrafocal photometry, in which the density of an out-of-focus stellar image on a photographic plate was used to determine the star’s apparent magnitude.
King was born in upstate New York in 1861 and educated at Hamilton College, some 50 miles east of Syracuse, where he graduated in 1887 with a BA degree, majoring in mathematics. In that same year, King obtained a position at the Harvard College Observatory, working under Edward Pickering , where he spent his entire career of 44 years’ duration.
Pickering introduced King to the relatively new technique of astronomical photography as...
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Selected References
Hearnshaw, John B. (1996). The Measurement of Starlight:Two Centuries of Astronomical Photometry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, esp. pp. 156–160.
King, Edward Skinner (1912). “Standard tests of photographic plates.” Annals of Harvard College Observatory 59: 1–32.
— (1912). “Photographic magnitudes of bright stars.” Annals of Harvard College Observatory 59: 95–126.
— (1913). “Absorption of light in space.” Popular Astronomy 21: 28–31.
— (1916). “Absorbing medium in space.” Annals of Harvard College Observatory 76, no. 1: 1–10.
— (1931). A Manual of Celestial Photography. Boston: Eastern Science Supply Company.
Payne, Cecilia H. (1932). “Edward Skinner King (1861–1931).” Popular Astronomy 40: 64–68.
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Hearnshaw, J. (2014). King, Edward Skinner. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_9313
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