Joseph Ashbrook
|
|
Joseph Ashbrook (April 4 1918 – August 4 1980) was an American astronomer
Ashbrook was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He was one of the first to study Cepheid variables as tools for establishing galactic distances. He was a longtime member of the AAVSO.
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.
He co-discovered the periodic comet 47P/Ashbrook-Jackson. A crater on the Moon and the asteroid 2157 Ashbrook are named after him.
He served as editor of Sky and Telescope magazine and wrote the Astronomical Scrapbook column for it.
External links
Obituaries
- JAVSO 9 (1980) 43 (http://adsabs.harvard.edu//full/seri/JAVSO/0009//0000043.000.html)
- Sky and Telescope 60 (1980) 281