Leon Campbell and His Fifty Years at Harvard College Observatory (Abstract)

Volume 39 number 1 (2011)

Thomas R. Williams

1750 Albans Road, Houston, TX 77005; trw@rice.edu

Abstract

(Abstract only) In traditional AAVSO historiography, Leon Campbell is presented as the first AAVSO Recorder, serving from 1915 to his retirement in 1949. Archival research provides a far more complex story about Campbell’s engagement with AAVSO and variable star astronomy over that extended period. In this paper, Campbell’s thirty-five years of support for the AAVSO in both informal and formal capacities will, instead, be set in the context of his full time employment on the staff of the Harvard College Observatory.