Everything about William Henry Pickering totally explained
William Henry Pickering (
February 15,
1858 –
January 17,
1938) was an
American astronomer, brother of
Edward Charles Pickering.
Work
He discovered
Saturn's ninth
moon Phoebe in
1899 from plates taken in
1898. He also believed he'd discovered a tenth moon in
1905 from plates taken in
1904, which he called "
Themis". Unfortunately "Themis" doesn't exist.
Following
George Darwin, he speculated in 1907 that the moon was once a part of the earth and that it broke away where now the
pacific ocean lies. He also proposed some sort of
continental drift (even before
Alfred Wegener) and speculated that
America,
Asia,
Africa, and
Europe once formed a single continent, which broke up because of the separation of the moon.
In
1908 he made a statement regarding the possibility of airplanes that hadn't yet been invented, saying that "a popular fantasy is to suppose that flying machines could be used to drop dynamite on the enemy in time of war".
He led
solar eclipse expeditions and studied
craters on the
Moon, and hypothesized that changes in the appearance of the crater
Eratosthenes were due to "lunar insects". He claimed to have found
vegetation on the moon.
In
1919, he predicted the existence and position of a
Planet X based on anomalies in the positions of
Uranus and
Neptune but a search of
Mount Wilson Observatory photographs failed to find the predicted planet.
Pluto was later discovered at Flagstaff by
Clyde Tombaugh in
1930, but in any case it's now known that Pluto's mass is far too small to have appreciable gravitational effects on Uranus or Neptune, and the anomalies are accounted for when today's much more accurate values of planetary masses are used in calculating orbits. When the planet was named, he interpreted its symbol as a monogram referring to himself and
Lowell by the phrase "Pickering-Lowell".
Pickering constructed and established several
observatories or astronomical observation stations, notably including
Percival Lowell's
Flagstaff Observatory. He spent much of the later part of his life at his private observatory in
Jamaica. He produced a photographic atlas of the Moon:
The Moon : A Summary of the Existing Knowledge of our Satellite — New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1903.
Pickering crater on the
Moon is jointly named after him and his brother
Edward Charles Pickering.
Further Information
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