William P. Bidelman

[29] Bidelman served in the U.S. Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground for over 2 years during World War II,.

[10] He attended the 1942 American Astronomical Society's annual meeting despite a small assembly due to gasoline rationing during World War II.

[33] In addition to Bidelman, by 1946 the Yerkes astronomy staff included Paul Ledoux, Arne Slettebak, Armin Deutsch, Marshall Wrubel, Arthur D. Code, Carlos Cesco, Víctor M. Blanco, W. W. Morgan, Otto Struve, Jesse L. Greenstein, Gerard P. Kuiper, George Van Biesbroeck, Louis G. Henyey Anne B. Underhill, Guido Münch, Nancy G. Roman,[34] and the two future Nobel Prize winners, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Gerhard Herzberg.

[35] Other astronomers at Yerkes when Bidelman was there were Kaj Strand, W. Albert Hiltner, Aden B. Meinel, and visiting professors Bengt Strömgren from Denmark, and Jan Oort, Hendrik C. van de Hulst and Adriaan Blaauw from the Netherlands.

Sung to the tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", it consisted of repeating three times the line: "Struve, Kuiper, Hiltner, Morgan, Chandrasekhar too," followed by: "And Billy Bidelman".

[41][notes 1] In 1946, W. W. Morgan and William P. Bidelman published a paper[43] on interstellar reddening using the MK system of spectral classifications and photoelectric photometry.

[59] Bidelman suggested when the displaced H-alpha(Hα) absorption line was present, it happened at regular intervals when the primary star was furthest away from Earth.

[65] Barium is a heavy metal element made by certain advanced stars with a helium-burning shell surrounding a spent carbon core[66] In addition to the λ4554 barium line, some other characteristics of the group were two enhanced strontium (SR II) lines, at λ4077 and another at λ4215 blended with the head of the CN band, and also an enhanced G band due to CH and possibly CN.

[79] The Bidelman family lived on Mount Hamilton and the children attended a one-room school where it was an hour's drive to the nearest grocery store.

[37] According to Stanislaus Vasilevskis, due to the lack of a high school for children and other features, Bidelman moved from Mount Hamilton to San Jose, and commuted to work.

[96] Re-elected to the Board of Directors, Bidelman was authorized to spend up to $1,000 for editorial assistance in 1959,[97][notes 3] and they published over 90 papers from ~38 institutions, 15 book reviews and a symposium.

[100] He was Third Vice President of ASP in 1961,[101] and they published six issues totaling 543 pages, including 100 articles from the United States and nine other countries, and other papers.

[102] Bidelman's annual report said being "largely responsible for the welfare" of the journal for approximately five years had been a considerable burden and having found it impossible to find a sufficiently competent technical assistant on Mount Hamilton and not being able to fulfill his obligations to both the university and to ASP, he requested to resign effective July 1, 1961,[102] He was re-elected to the board of directors.

[104] Bidelman summarized his experiences in a 1989 talk entitled "A funny thing happened on the way to the Stanford Press - reminiscences of Five Years with the PASP".

[93] In 1962, Bidelman helped Soviet astronomers edit a manuscript for English readers,[105] He continued on the ASP Publications Committee, no longer as chair, in 1962,[106] 1963,[107] 1964,[108] 1965,[109] 1966,[110][111] 1967,[112] 1968,[113] 1969,[114] and 1970.

[123] At the University of Michigan, Freeman D. Miller and Bidelman began to direct the complete reactivation of the Curtis Schmidt telescope, to search for stars with spectra that showed unusual chemical compositions.

[124] Under a National Science Foundation grant to Bidelman, Darrell Jack MacConnell moved the telescope,[127] and the two later conducted research using objective-prism plates taken with by the Curtis Schmidt.

Houk eventually led the Michigan Survey and because it was anticipated that the work which she began in 1970 would not be completed until 2004, Bidelman used the same Curtis Schmidt objective-prism lens plates to begin an "early results" program.

The second was when Bidelman was president of the International Astronomical Union's Commission 45 and they discussed the issue at the 1967 IAU meeting in Prague Czechoslovakia.

[140] By the end of the school year, Bidelman resigned to accept the position of Director of the Warner and Swasey Observatory and Chairman of Astronomy at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Ohio.

[142] Due to light pollution from the city of Cleveland, by the 1950s viewing was difficult and the Burrell Schmidt telescope was relocated ~30 miles away to Geauga County.

[146] Their study was called a "major contribution" in providing data to help identify the relatively rare Population II stars.

[152] Michaud suggested that element segregation would proceed naturally due to gravitational settling and radiation pressure if the stellar atmosphere was steady.

[158] When Kuiper found evidence of an atmosphere on Saturn's moon, Titan, his research changed focus and much of his data on proper motion stars remained unpublished.

[164] The outlook for employment in research astronomy was bleak, so the group began a mail-order business and took part-time jobs to solve their "food on the table problem" while seeking to build an observatory in California, and Bidelman gave them their first cash donation.

Informed it is and another one of its names is V729 Cyg,[168][notes 6] Bidelman responded, "Well, I'd like to say, as a member of an IAU Commission concerned with such things, that one should adopt a consistent labeling for a star".

As she finished the southern classifications, Bidelman became responsible to oversee taking the northern plates at CWRU's new Kitt Peak observation site in Arizona.

[170] When the telescope at Kitt Peak became operational in 1981, Bidelman continued his "early-results" research involving "systematic, but nonetheless somewhat cursory inspection" to classify stars for the northern hemisphere that had been given HD numbers, and published the spectral data in 1983.

His father died suddenly when he was four, and subsequently Bidelman moved with his mother to Grand Forks, North Dakota where his grandparents (Architect Joseph Bell DeRemer and his wife Elizabeth) raised him.

In addition to Alfred Joy, Bidelman recalled "with great pleasure" Bart Bok, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and Martin Schwarzschild from Harvard, and "the whole motley Yerkes crew: Struve, Greenstein, Henyey, Chandrasekhar, Kuiper and all the rest", and stated he marveled at his youthful contacts with them and their passionate devotion to science and to life.

Light dispersion of a mercury-vapor lamp with a flint glass prism IPNr°0125
A prism disperses visible light disperse when passing through a prism, displaying a spectrum .
A curved rainbow against a grey sky.
Though the colors of a star's spectrum appear similar to a rainbow, a rainbow emits no light. Information about elements present at a star's surface, and many other features are found within the spectrum of a star.
Yerkes Observatory Astro4p1
Yerkes, located in the village of Williams Bay, Wisconsin [ 31 ] is where faculty and students lived, and they rarely visited the Chicago campus. [ 32 ]
Capella spectrum average
A spectrum from the star Capella . Vertical absorption lines are related to the elements and ions present in a star's atmosphere.
PSM V11 D072 Coronal borealis variable star spectrum
A spectrum from an R CrB star in black and white displays some of its complexity. As a spectroscopist, Bidelman needed to identify the origins of lines like these.
Our yellow sun creates an orange sky on a black sky.
To accurately understand the stars, astronomers must compensate for the impact of dust between the stars that will make them appear dimmer and redder than they are. Dust causes the sky to redden at sunset and sunrise, when being seen at the horizon through more of our atmosphere. [ 42 ]
Double Cluster
Star clusters are contain stars born at the same time out of the same material and are the same distance from Earth, and can be valuable in understanding how stars change over time . [ 46 ]
Dwarf star spectra (luminosity class V) from Pickles 1998
Vertical Lines of H-alpha and Balmer lines are shown using spectra from many dwarf stars. Weak Balmer lines show a star's atmosphere to be hydrogen-deficient.
Nucleosynthesis in a star
Stars make elements , and what a star makes depend on its mass at its beginning. When Bidelman and Keenan noticed a strong line of ionized barium at the position λ 4554 in the spectra of stars theories said were too young and the wrong kind to produce any barium, it created a mystery for astronomers.
ESO - Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram (by)
When Hertzsprung and Russell independently plotted stars on a chart of luminosity vs. temperature, they found there are patterns. The HR Diagram is a tool used by astronomers to know what stars are and how they will change.
Evolutionary track 5m
A star follows a pattern as it ages that depends on its mass at the beginning. Here, a chart depicting temperature and luminosity shows how a star five times the mass of the Sun changes from a main sequence star into a white dwarf and a planetary nebula.
On top of Mount Hamilton, Lick Observatory sits while star trails suggests the movements of the night sky.
Lick Observatory was the first permanently occupied observatory built on a mountain. [ 78 ] The night sky over Mount Hamilton displays star trails due to the Earth's rotation.
Star types T through O
Stars vary from the relatively hot O and B-type stars to the relatively cooler and reddish M stars.
The large white cone-shaped Curtis-Schmidt points through an observatory opening into the night sky.
The Schmidt telescope is a camera that can photograph large areas. Bidelman helped move this Schmidt to South America , then later used it for an all-sky study of the southern hemisphere.
The Observatory housing the Otto Struve Telescope at McDonald Observatory, Texas.
Burrell Schmidt telescope at the Warner & Swasey Observatory at Kitt Peak
Moving the Burrell Schmidt to Kitt Peak in Arizona made it possible to continue the "early results" program to the Northern Celestial Hemisphere .
Components of proper motion
The movement that is intrinsic to a star, or part of its "property", is called the "proper motion" of a star.
Barnard's star (HIP 87937) is the highest proper motion star known. Stars of greater proper motion appear to move more greatly against the background of stars as seen from Earth, so proper motion can be used to help find stars located closer to our planet. [ 157 ]
Hubble 01 Cropped
In 1977, Congress agreed to fund the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope , named after Edwin Hubble . [ 166 ] In September 1977, Bidelman served on the Ad Hoc Advisory Subcommittee for NASA 's Space Telescope. [ 160 ]
Electromagnetic-Spectrum
Bidelman also conducted research with infrared and ultraviolet data as they became available.
Venus-Jupiter Conjunction in Leo · 1 July 2015
A close conjunction of Venus and Jupiter in Leo in July 2015 gave a suggestion of the conjunctions in 3 and 2 BC which Bidelman argued were a plausible explanation for the biblical Star of Bethlehem. [ 178 ]
Four horizontal panels displaying stellar spectra with vertical lines.
Bidelman wrote the section on Spectral Classification for the U.S. Navy's 1992 edition of The Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac . [ 201 ] In it he wrote, "The road from Secchi to Morgan and Keenan and beyond has been long and winding, and its end is still now only faintly glimpsed". [ 202 ]