Biography Quarter 3

Henry Draper

Henry Draper was born on March 7, 1837 in Prince Edward County, Virginia. He was the son of William Draper, who was a professor of chemistry at New York University and was also the first to photograph the moon through a telescope in 1839-1840. Draper's mother was Antonia Coetana de Paiva Pereira Gardner, who was the daughter of the personal physician to the Emperor of Brazil. By 1850, Willaim Draper involved Henry in his photographic projects. When he was 20, Draper graduated from New York University medical school. He then he traveled in Europe for a year. While in Europe, he took a tour of Lord Rosse's observatory in Ireland, which at the time housed the world's largest telescope, the 72-inch "Leviathan" reflector. Draper became determined to use photography for astronomical purposes, so he took the first steps by building an observatory on his father's estate. However he was also a physician at Bellevue Hospital, and later both a professor and dean of medicine at NYU. Draper was married in 1867 to Anna Mary Palmer. Draper was awarded many honors such as honorary law degrees from NYU and the University of Wisconsin, a Congressional medal for directing the U.S. expedition to photograph the 1874 transit of Venus, and election to both the National Academy of Sciences and the Astronomische Gesellschaft. He also held memberships in the American Photographic Society, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Draper's most famous accomplishment was obtaining the first photograph of an astronomical nebula - the Great Nebula of Orion on the night of September 30, 1880. He also took the first stellar spectrum photograph which was of Vega in August 1872, the first wide-angle photograph of a comet's tail, and the first spectrum of a comet's head, both of these with Tebbutt's Comet in 1881. Draper also collected many high-quality photographs of the Moon in 1863, a benchmark spectrum of the Sun in 1873, and spectra of the Orion Nebula, the Moon, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and many bright stars. He also invented the slit spectrograph and pushed the state of the art in photography, instrumental optics, and telescope clock drives, the steadiness of which is essential for long photographic exposures. He wrote a textbook on chemistry and published much of his astronomical work, including monographs on telescope design and spectrum analysis. Draper and suggested building observatories in the Andes to avoid atmospheric turbulence and haze. In 1882, Draper died from double pleurisy. However, his legacy lives on in the Henry Draper Catalogue (HD) which is a catalogue of the spectral types and positions of 225,300 stars, down to about magnitude 8, compiled by Annie Jump Cannon and her coworkers at Harvard College Observatory between 1918 and 1924. There is also the Henry Draper Extension Charts , or the second extension, which provide spectral classification for some 87,000 stars between the 10th and 11th magnitude. There is also a small crater on the moon named after him.