Moore, Joseph Haines

MOORE, JOSEPH HAINES

(b. Wilmington, Ohio, 7 September 1878; d. Oakland, California, 15 March 1949)

astronomy.

The only child of John Haines Moore and Mary Ann Haines, Moore graduated from Wilmington College in 1897. His field was classics, but during his senior year he became interested in astronomy. He then entered Johns Hopkins University, concentrating in physics, with minors in mathematics and astronomy, and received his Ph.D. in 1903. He immediately took a position as assistant to W. W. Campbell, director of the Lick Observatory; he passed through all the grades to astronomer (1923), was appointed assistant director in 1936, and director in 1942. Poor health forced him to relinquish the directorship in 1945 and move to a lower altitude, but he was engaged in teaching and research at the University of California at Berkeley until six months before his death. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, served as chairman of the astronomical section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was twice president of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Moore was married in 1907 to Fredrica Chase, a computing assistant at the Lick Observatory. Modest and unassuming, he held to the Quaker philosophy all his life and was always regarded with deep affection by his colleagues and students.

Moore’s principal scientific work was concerned with astronomical spectroscopy, in particular with the measurement of radial velocities of stars. From 1909 to 1913 he was in charge of the observatory’s southern station at Santiago, Chile, and during this time some 2,700 stellar spectrograms were obtained there. As progressively more of Campbell’s time was expended on other duties, Moore took over more of the spectrographic work of the observatory. In collaboration with Campbell he published (1918) the radial velocities of 125 bright-line nebulae, and he played the major role in producing (1928) the exhaustive discussion of the Mount Hamilton and Santiago radial-velocity measurements of all stars brighter than visual magnitude 5.51. Moore also made observations of fainter stars, and his “A General Catalogue of the Radial Velocities of Stars, Nebulae and Clusters” (1932) remained the standard work for two decades.

A by-product of radial-velocity studies was the discovery of spectroscopic binary stars. Moore discovered and calculated the orbits of many of these objects, and the results of this work were included in the third, fourth, and fifth catalogues of spectroscopic binaries, which he published in 1924, 1939, and 1948, respectively.

Moore took part in five eclipse expeditions, obtaining important spectroscopic information on the structure and composition of the solar corona. He led the Lick eclipse expeditions to Camptonville, California (1930) and to Fryeburg, Maine (1932).

Among Moore’s other contributions were spectro-scopic observations of novae, the companion of Sirius, the comet Pons-Winnecke, and the eclipsed moon. He also made spectroscopic determinations of the rotation periods of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune (the last two in collaboration with D. H. Menzel); the result for Neptune, published in 1928, is still the accepted value.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Moore’s most important writings are “Methods of Measurement and Reduction of Spectro-grams for the Determination of Radial Velocities,” in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 19 (1907), 13–26; “The Spectrographic Velocities of the Bright-Line Nebulae,” in Publications of the Lick Observ-atory, 13 (1918), 75–186, written with W. W. Campbell; “Third Catalogue of Spectroscopic Binary Stars,” in Lick Observatory Bulletin, 11 (1924), 141–185; “Radial Veloc-ities of Stars Brighter than Visual Magnitude 5.51 As Determined at Mount Hamilton and Santiago,” in Publi-cations of the Lick Observatory, 16 (1928), written with W. W. Campbell; “The Crocker Eclipse Expedition of the Lick Observatory to Camptonville, California, April 28, 1930,” in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 42 (1930), 131–144; “The Lick Observatory Crocker Eclipse Expedition to Fryeburg, Maine, August 31, 1932,” ibid., 44 (1932), 341–352; “A General Catalogue of the Radial Velocities of Stars, Nebulae and Clusters,” in Publications of the Lick Observatory, 18 (1932); “Fourth Catalogue of Spectroscopic Binary Stars,” in Lick Observatory Bulletin, 18 (1936), 1–37; and “Fifth Catalogue of Spectroscopic Binary Stars,” ibid., 20 (1948), 1–31, written with F. J. Neubauer. Moore also wrote numerous shorter items and survey papers for the Lick Observatory Bulletin and the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

II. Secondary Literture. For biographical information see R. G. Aitken, “Joseph Haines Moore: 1878–1949—A Tribute,”, in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 61 (1949), 125–128; R. G. Aitken, C. D. Shane, R. J. Trumpler and W. H. Wright, “Joseph Haines Moore, 1878–1949,” in Popular Astronomy, 57 (1949), 372–375; and F. J. Neubauer, “J. H. Moore—A Good Neigh-bor,” in Sky and Telescope, 8 (1949), 197–198.

Brian G. Marsden