James Keeler bio

Shannon Sims
Astronomy Hon. Period 00
Mr. Percival
February 24, 2010

James Edward Keeler

James Edward Keeler was born September 10, 1857 and died in August 12, 1900. He was a very successful American astronomer. He married and had two children. In 1899 he won the Henry Draper Medal. This medal was awarded to U.S. Astronomers by the U.S. National Academy of Science. He died in 1900 at the age of 42, his ashes were interred in a crypt along the base of a 31 inch Keeler Memorial telescope. This telescope is at the Allegheny Observatory.

Before he was appointed the director of the University of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Observatory, which happened in 1891, he worked at the Lick Observatory, starting in 1888. At Lick Observatory on 7 January he was the first person to observe the Encke Gap, the gap in Saturn’s rings by using a 36 inch refractor. This was named after him and also when the Voyager discovered a second major gap in the A ring they named it the Keeler Gap in James Keeler’s honor. He did more work with Saturn’s rings, he noticed different Doppler shifts and the reasons for so he came up with was, that they had different rates of orbit. This confirmed James Clerk Maxwell theory that Saturn’s rings are made up of countless small objects. Each which orbit around at the objects own rate. James Keeler made this observation with a spectrograph which attached to a 13 inch Fizclark refracting telescope. He did these observations at Allegheny Observatory. Because of James’ many amazing discoveries with the reflecting telescope, he made showed how important the use of large optical reflecting telescopes are. Even after his death he was still discovering new objects. After his death his fellow colleagues had his photographs of nebulae and clusters. They did this in a special volume that consisted of Lick Observatory publications. In 1899 and 1900 he also discovered two asteroids. Although one of his asteroids where sadly lost, and it only took about 100 years later for Astronomers to find it, but his other one was name after him, asteroid 2261 Keeler. Crater on Mars and the Moon where also named in James’ honor.