Mercury,
November/December 2005 Table of Contents
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Courtesy
of UC/Lick Observatory. |
by
Robert P. Kraft
As
you just learned from Sidney Wolff’s very generous introduction,
I’ve received some honors in the past, but none are so dear
to me as the Bruce Medal, in part because I’ve been a member
of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific since I was nineteen
years old, joining in 1946 some 59 years ago, and in part because
I’ve been put on a list that contains many of my astronomical
heroes: great stellar spectroscopists such as Otto Struve, who could
discourse with authority on every astronomical topic known in the
1930s and 40s and who wrote some 400 papers; Jesse Greenstein, who
founded the Caltech astronomy department, who also wrote some 400
papers, and who was the prime mover on the observational side in
the study of the chemical evolution of the Universe; and George
Herbig, who pioneered the study of star formation in the 1950s and
60s, from whom I had the benefit of sage advice when he took me
on as a Ph.D. thesis student at Lick Observatory in 1953. I profited
from their example on the personal as well as research level and
have to say I am still amazed to be on a list with them.
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