Joseph Ashbrook (April 4, 1918 – August 4, 1980) was an American astronomer.
He started to work at Sky and Telescope in 1953, where he wrote the column "Astronomical Scrapbook" from 1954 to 1980, and remained on its staff until his death; he also edited the magazine from 1964 on.
[1] Ashbrook was one of the first to study Cepheid variables as tools for establishing galactic distances.
He went through old archives of observations from centuries past to determine a highly precise value for the rotation period of Mars —to within a few thousandths of a second.
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