Abstract
BY the death of George Ellery Hale on February 22, at Pasadena, California, solar physics loses its greatest leader. Born in Chicago on June 29, 1868, he had already in 1890, before completing his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, begun working at the Harvard College Observatory on his idea of a spectroheliograph. Resisting the temptation to accept Prof. Holden's offer of opportunities to develop his new instrument in connexon with the 36-in. refractor at the Lick Observatory, he established with his father's help a private observatory at Kenwood, in a suburb of Chicago. There, working in the fourth order of a 4-in. Rowland grating attached to a 12·2-in. equatorial, he studied the spectrum of the solar prominences and photographed them in monochromatic light, using first of all the bright K line of calcium. As he found by photographic spectroscopic observations that the bright K2 line could be detected here and there on the disk of the sun, he extended his work to monochromatic studies of the whole solar disk, finding the presence of great areas of glowing calcium clouds in general around sunspots. By 1892, his pioneer work had won for him recognition by the University of Chicago, of which he became an associate professor.
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STRATTON, F. Dr. G. E. Hale, For.Mem.R.S. Nature 141, 501–502 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/141501a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/141501a0