Charlotte Moore Sitterly
Born on 24 September 1898 in Ercildoun, Pennsylvania, Charlotte Moore Sitterly was an astronomer whose compilation of data on a wide swath of the solar spectrum remains invaluable to the scientific community. After earning a degree in mathematics from Swarthmore College, she got a job as an assistant and “computer” for Princeton astronomer Henry Norris Russell. She calculated the orbits of and distances to thousands of binary stars. She also began collecting data on atomic spectra, which was needed to identify spectral lines in observations of the Sun. After Russell left Princeton for a two-year trip to Europe, Moore pursued and received her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. She returned to Princeton until Russell retired and then became head of the atomic spectroscopy program at the Bureau of Standards (now NIST). There she compiled data on atomic spectra, urged experimenters to obtain much-needed data, and analyzed UV spectral measurements of the Sun obtained during rocket flights. Her data tables and three-volume Atomic Energy Levels are still relied upon by scientists today. She received the Annie Jump Cannon Award, the Bruce Medal, and other honors. She died in 1990 at age 91; here is the Physics Today obituary . (Photo credit: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection)
Date in History: 24 September 1898
