biography
| name: |
Pickering, William Henry
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1858–1938)
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| biography:
| Astronomer, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, the brother of Edward Charles Pickering. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, he joined Harvard's astronomy department (1887–1924). He pioneered dry-plate celestial photography and took important early photographs of Mars (1888) and the Moon (1900), and was the first to discover a satellite by photography when he located Phoebe, Saturn's ninth moon (1899). His published analyses of Martian canals and his independent prediction of Pluto's existence (1919) rivalled Percival Lowell's work. He established Harvard observatories at Arequipa, Peru (1891) and in Jamaica (1900), and Percival Lowell's observatory at Flagstaff, AZ (1894). |
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