Abstract
A NUMBER of Victory Ships recently lauriched from the slips of the California Shipbuilding Corporation at Wilmington, California, have been named after astronomers. Ship No. 125 of the corporation's wartime programme, the s.s. George E. Hale, was launched on January 19 last after only 27 days on the ways, and commemorates the inventor of the speotrohelio -graph and speetrohelioscope, founder of the Astro-physical Journal, and constructional genius mainly responsible for the design and erection of the world's largest refracting and reflecting telescopes at Yerkes and Mt. Wilson respectively. The s.s. Maria Mitchell, vessel No. 147, takes her name from the professor of astronomy at Vassar College, who discovered a comet and who was the first of her sex to be elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ship No. 158, the s.s. Simon Newcomb, launched on March 26, is named after the famous superintendent of the American Nautical Almanac Office, who was commissioned professor of mathematics in the U.S. Navy by Abraham Lincoln and who did perhaps more than any other man to popularize astronomy in the United States.
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Astronomy in Ships' Names. Nature 152, 18 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/152018a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/152018a0