- Roscoe Frank Sanford
Roscoe Frank Sanford (October 6, 1883-April 7, 1958) was an American
astronomer .He was born in
Faribault, Minnesota , the eldest of five children of Frank W. Sanford and his wife Alberta Nichols. After an early education in his home town he attended theUniversity of Minnesota , where he received aA.B. in 1905. He was also a runner up for aRhodes scholarship .He taught
High School students for a year then became an assistant at theLick Observatory . TheCarnegie Institute of Washington approved plans byLewis Boss for an observation station inSouth America , and Roscoe Sanford was selected to travel there as an assistant. The nine-man group spent nearly two years making observations of the brightest-magnitude stars in the southern hemisphere, with Roscoe makingtelescope observations and meridian-circle readings.After returning to the United States, he went back to South America in 1911 as an assistant at
Santiago, Chile . There he developed an interest in stellar spectra using photography. Among his work was measurements of velocities of theMagellanic Clouds , the first such study of extra-galactic velocities.He returned to
Lick Observatory in 1915, and was granted the Martin Kellogg Fellowship until 1916 then the Lick Fellowship up to 1917. He was awarded hisPh.D. in 1917 from theUniversity of California . The same year he was married to Mabel Aline Dyer. The couple would have five children: Jane, Eleanor, Wallace, Allan and Marguerite.Coincidently, his greatgranddaughter, Kelsey, was born on what would have been his 110th birthday in Michigan. Dr. Sanford spent a short time working at theDudley Observatory , then joined the staff of theMount Wilson Observatory . He would remain there for much of the remainder of his career, retiring in 1949. He then spent two years on classified research before returning to Mount Wilson where he continued to contribute until 1956.During his career he published over sixty papers, many of them dealing with the spectra of
spectroscopic binaries ,variable star s, andCepheid variable s, includingradial velocity measurements. His most significant contribution was to the study of R- and N-class stars belonging to the coolred dwarf type (later reclassified asCarbon star s). He published an atlas of the spectra for late-type Carbon stars, and also determined the specral features of the isotopeCarbon-13 .In 1944 he was president of the
Astronomical Society of the Pacific , and he served on two of the commissions (29 and 30) of theInternational Astronomical Union . He was literate in Spanish and wrote two papers in that language.Sanford crater on the
Moon was named after him.References
* R.E. Wilson, 1958, " [http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1958PASP...70..360W Roscoe Frank Sanford, 1883-1958] ", "Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific", Vol. 70, No. 415, p. 360.
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