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Article ID: CBB154493444

The Early Years of the Solar Variations Project at Lowell Observatory: Birth Pangs of a Decades-Long Research Endeavor (2023)

Lockwood, G. Wesley (Author)
Sheehan, William (Author)

Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage
Volume: 24
Issue: 3
Pages: 563-584

DOI: 10.3724/SP.J.1440-2807.2021.03.01

URI: https://www.sciengine.com/10.3724/SP.J.1440-2807.2021.03.01

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Telescopes Planetary science Solar system; planets Weather Galaxies; nebulae Astronomy 20th century Johnson, Harold Lester Slipher, Vesto Melvin Lowell, Percival Lowell Observatory

Though tied up in law suits by Percival Lowell's widow and embattled in defending his controversial theories about Mars, the senior staff at Lowell's Observatory, led by Director V.M. Slipher, re-established its scientific credentials in the 1920s and 30s through Slipher's important work on the spectra of the nebulae and Clyde Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto. However, by the mid-1940s, the Observatory had become moribund. It was rescued by a US Weather Bureau initiative to study atmospheric phenomena on Mars and Jupiter using Lowell's data in order to understand what Harry Wexler called "extraterrestrial control of long-period weather-analogies." This initiative brought outside funding to the Observatory for the first time.The most interesting arm of this research involved not the study of old Lowell Mars and Jupiter photographs but an idea proposed by staff astronomer Henry Giclas to monitor solar variations based on photoelectric measurements of sunlight reflected from the distant planets Uranus and Neptune. Briefly, Harold Lester Johnson helped with the project, but left Lowell after only six months, and Giclas struggled for three years with the primitive equipment available in those days and with the culture at the Observatory whose senior staff were increasingly behind the times. After the death of long-time staff member C.O. Lampland, the Observatory managed to rehire Johnson in 1952, and this time with a specially dedicated 21-inch telescope he successfully pushed the program forward and in so doing helped steer the Observatory toward what, under Director John S. Hall, became its main research emphasis, photoelectric photometry.By the time Johnson left Flagstaff for McDonald Observatory in 1959, he had planted the seeds not only for a continuation of the solar variations project itself, but for it to continue studying planetary seasonal variability and milli-magnitude luminosity variations of Sun-like stars, which continued to grow for close to three quarters of a century until the telescope was finally mothballed in 2016.

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