The people

It is the people of the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory that have made it a great success since 1918. Plaskett has his own page on this site, but here are some of the noteworthy people of the Observatory from its opening in 1918 until it became a part of the National Research Council in 1970.

• Reynold Kenneth Young - Young was the first staff member of the Observatory, joining Plaskett in Victoria in 1917. He worked with Harper, the next staff member to join the Observatory, measuring the parallaxes of over 1,000 stars. In 1922, Young was a member of the Canadian expedition to Western Australia to observe the total solar eclipse in September. He returned to Victoria to measure the images obtained during the eclipse and confirmed the Einstein effect - the bending of starlight by the Sun.

• William Edmund Harper - Harper joined the staff of the Observatory in 1919. However, he made a major contribution to the Observatory in 1913. In that year, he travelled across Canada to test the observing conditions at four potential sites for the new large telescope. The four sites were Lethbridge, Alberta, Banff, Alberta, Penticton, BC and Victoria, BC. His measurements showed that Victoria was the best site which is where the telescope was constructed. Harper’s area of research was binary stars. He observed the most, obtained the most data, measured the most photographic plates and discovered the most binary stars of any of the early Observatory staff. He became Director of the Observatory in 1936 when Plaskett retired.

• Thomas Tenant Hutchison - T.T. Hutchison worked at the Observatory during its construction between 1915 and 1918. He served as site manager and is seen in many of the construction photographs. He continued working at the Observatory when it was completed. He often assisted with night-time observations but his main responsibility was keeping the telescope and dome in good working order and implementing improvements. He lived on Observatory with his wife Molly

• Harry Hemley Plaskett - The son of John Stanley Plaskett, Harry went on to his own very distinguished career in astronomy. After serving in the First World War, he returned to Canada and joined the staff of the Observatory, He made significant contributions to the fields of solar physics, astronomical spectroscopy and spectrophotometry during his career. In 1928 he was appointed Professor at Harvard University. In 1932, he was appointed Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford.

• Helen Sawyer Hogg - Helen came to Victoria in August 1931 when the Observatory hired her husband Frank. Helen had a Ph.D. in astronomy but the Observatory could not give her a position as it was Government policy during the Great Depression that only one family member could be employed by the Government. Plaskett was able to provide her with a stipend that allowed her to hire a housekeeper. This allowed her to continue her research in stellar clusters. Unlikeall the other astronomers on staff, she used the Newtonian focus of the telescope to take direct images. She and Frank moved to Toronto in 1935 where Helen eventually got a position at the University of Toronto. Helen was a great populizer of astronomy and wrote a famous book The Stars Belong to Everyone.

• Joseph Algernon Pearce - Joseph joined the Observatory in 1924 while he was still working on his PhD at the University of California Berkeley. He worked with Plaskett to determine the size and mass of the Milky Way, and the Sun’s location in the Milky Way. He was Director of the Observatory from 1941 to 1950. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1931, he was president in 1949.

• Carlyle S. Beals - Beals worked at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory from 1927 until 1946, becoming Assistant Director of the DAO in 1940. His work showed that the broad emission lines seen in Wolf-Rayet and P Cygni-type stars were due to strong stellar winds. During the Second World War, Beals spent two years researching defences against chemical weapons and designing gas masks. He was appointed Dominion Astronomer in 1947.

• Andrew McKellar - McKellar joined the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in 1935, where he researched molecular astrophysics using high-resolution spectroscopy. In 1940, McKellar made the first identification of molecular matter(CN) in the interstellar medium. The following year, his analysis of the spectra of the cyano radical showed that the surrounding space was very cold with a temperature of approximately -271 °C. Twenty-five years later microwave radiation coming from all regions of the sky corresponding to the same temperature of -271 °C found by McKellar, thus revealing its ubiquity and relation to the radiation left over from the Big Bang. McKellar's early death, after a prolonged illness, in 1960 precluded him from consideration for the Nobel Prize awarded to Penzias and Wilson in 1978. The coude spectrograph of the 1.2-m telescope at the DAO is named after him.

• Robert Methven Petrie - Petrie obtained his PhD at the University of Michigan in 1932 and taught there until 1935, when he joined the staff of the Observatory. In 1951 he became its director when Pearce stepped down. Petrie became interested in astronomy in high school and was encouraged by John Stanley Plaskett. the last Dominion Astronomer in 1964. His studies of spectroscopic binaries and the motions and distances of hot B-type stars won international acclaim. When he died, he was planning the construction of a very large Canadian telescope (QE II Telescope). He was the first Canadian astronomer to become a VP of the International Astronomical Union (1958-64).

• Kenneth Osborne Wright - Wright joined the staff of the DAO in 1936, completing his PhD at the University of Michigan in 1940. His primary research interest was in super-giant systems like Zeta Aurigae and the relative abundances of chemical elements in solar-type stars. He served as Director of the Observatory from 1966 to 1976.

• Eric Harvey Richardson - Richardson received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1961 and joined the Observatory staff that year. He spent the rest of his career in Victoria, first at the DAO then the University Victoria after 1991. His innovative optical designs exploited the most recent developments in materials and software. He introduced small coudé mirrors, with high reflection coatings, that was coupled with a brilliant image slicer design and 4-grating mosaic which gave the McKellar spectrograph on the DAO 1.2 m telescope a gold standard performance. At one time, Harvey and Chris Morbey generated a camera design with such superb resolution that the Americans vetoed its publication! The air of the exotic was greatly enhanced by Harvey’s sartorial choices in hats and coats. 

• Anne Barbara Underhill - Underhill received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1948 under the supervision of famous astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. She is most widely known for her work on early-type stars and was considered one of the world's leading experts in the field. Underhill worked at the Observatory from 1949 until 1962. During this time she was a visiting professor at both Harvard and Princeton universities. While at Princeton she used their computing facilities to write software to model stellar atmospheres.