Alvan Graham Clark
19th-century American astronomer
Alvan Graham Clark (July 10, 1832, June 9, 1897) was an American astronomer and telescope-maker.
01Biography
Alvan Graham Clark was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, the son of Alvan Clark, founder of Alvan Clark & Sons.
On January 31, 1862, while testing a new 18.5-inch (470 mm) aperture great refractor telescope in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, Clark made the first ever observation of a white dwarf star. This discovery of Sirius B, or affectionately "the Pup", proved an earlier hypotheses (Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel in 1844) that Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky with an apparent magnitude of −1.46, had an unseen companion disturbing its motion. Clark used the largest refracting telescope lens in existence at the time, and the largest telescope in the United States, to observe the magnitude 8 companion.
Clark's 18.5 inch refracting telescope was then delivered to his customer, the landmark Dearborn Observatory of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where it is still being used today.
Alvan Graham Clark died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on June 9, 1897.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Alvan Graham Clark”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Alvan Graham Clark.jpg by Thomas Rice Burnham (1834-1893), Boston, Public domain
- Yerkes Observatory Astro4p6.jpg by Photo Credit: Yerkes Observatory, Public domain
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