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13 SEPTEMBER 1912-29 AUGUST 2003
HORACE W. BABCOCK was one of the greatest astronomers of the twentieth century. He was a unique combination of an inventor of astronomical instruments of revolutionary design and a superb astrophysicist who began two new fields of astrophysics. He was the discoverer with his father of the very weak solar polar magnetic field that reverses with the sunspot cycle. His precision astronomical instruments were devices to analyze the data. He was the discoverer of the large magnetic fields in stars, the inventor of the discipline of adaptive optics of large telescope mirrors to correct the effects of atmospheric turbulence ("seeing"), and a remarkable administrator as the final longtime director of the combined Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories. In addition, in the last fifteen years of his career he was the founder of the remote Las Campanas Observatory of the Carnegie Institution in the central Chilean Andes with its innovative large field of view DuPont 2.5-meter reflector, joined later by its twin 6.5-meter reflectors completed after Babcock's tenure, and now by the giant 25-meter seven-mirror (each of 8.3 meters diameter) Magellan gargantuan telescope under construction.
Horace Welcome Babcock was born in Pasadena, California, on 13 September 1912. He was the only child of Harold and Mary Babcock. His father, an astronomer of the early legendary Mount Wilson Observatory, had joined its scientific staff in 1909, five years after its founding by George Ellery Hale in 1904. Harold Delos Babcock was an expert in the then young science of laboratory spectroscopy. He had graduated from the University of California in physics in 1906, had worked as a laboratory spectroscopist at the Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., for a few years, and then was a teacher of physics in the department at Berkeley, where he remained until he joined the small group of Pasadena astronomers that would eventually expand into the renowned staff of the Mount Wilson Observatory. Horace Babcock grew up in the heady astronomical atmosphere that surrounded his eminent father, who was one of the central founding fathers of the new observatory.
The 60-inch reflector had been put into service on Mount Wilson in 1909. But even before it had been tested and placed in regular use, funds had...