286
Appendix B: Literature
Cornelius Kapteyn; Born investigator of the heavens are recommended; these
contain a lot of details and deal with technical matters regarding his scientific
research.
• Various articles have been written about Kapteyn over the years, sometimes
as an in memoriam shortly after his death or as a eulogy at the presentation
of honors or as short biographies. These can be found on the Kapteyn Webpage mentioned above, where generally links are available to electronic copies.
Kapteyn’s scientific genealogy is also presented there.
• Most of Kapteyn’s letters and other archival material have been lost; probably during the bombardment of Rotterdam in May 1940. This can probably
be explained as follows (see also the discussions in the last two of the works
just mentioned): Willem de Sitter and Johan Huizinga intended to write a
biography of Kapteyn, but never realized it. Aernout de Sitter, son of Willem,
might have had the same intention later; when he became director of the Observatory of Lembang in the former Dutch East Indies, he could then have
shipped the Kapteyn archives in a large chest, which happened to be located
in the Rotterdam harbor in 1940. Fortunately, but without any real apparent
reason, the letters from David Gill to Kapteyn – and only those letters – have
been preserved in the archives of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen. I have scanned them and made them publicly available in
electronic form on the Kapteyn Webpage.
• Kapteyn’s scientific publications are for a large part available electronically
on the Astronomy Data System (ADS; see below). References and links can
be found on the Kapteyn Webpage; where articles are not available in ADS,
I have in some cases (especially Dutch language popular articles) made them
available there electronically.
Astronomy is in the fortunate circumstance that almost all of the professional literature, as far as it has appeared in scientific (and also many popular)
journals or as observatory or institute publications or (annual) reports, has been
scanned and made available electronically. If applicable, this even goes back to
the eighteenth or nineteenth century. This project, the Harvard–Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics/National Aeronautics and Space Agency Astrophysics
Data System (SAO/NASA ADS, or ADS for short) is available free of charge
to anyone up to the year in which magazine publishers have introduced electronic subscriptions. In the latter case, a link to the magazine’s site is provided;
sometimes it is available in the framework of Open Access, but in some cases
such a subscription is be required. Recently, for most astronomical journals,
the articles are made available one year after publication as part of Open
Appendix B: Literature
Cornelius Kapteyn; Born investigator of the heavens are recommended; these
contain a lot of details and deal with technical matters regarding his scientific
research.
• Various articles have been written about Kapteyn over the years, sometimes
as an in memoriam shortly after his death or as a eulogy at the presentation
of honors or as short biographies. These can be found on the Kapteyn Webpage mentioned above, where generally links are available to electronic copies.
Kapteyn’s scientific genealogy is also presented there.
• Most of Kapteyn’s letters and other archival material have been lost; probably during the bombardment of Rotterdam in May 1940. This can probably
be explained as follows (see also the discussions in the last two of the works
just mentioned): Willem de Sitter and Johan Huizinga intended to write a
biography of Kapteyn, but never realized it. Aernout de Sitter, son of Willem,
might have had the same intention later; when he became director of the Observatory of Lembang in the former Dutch East Indies, he could then have
shipped the Kapteyn archives in a large chest, which happened to be located
in the Rotterdam harbor in 1940. Fortunately, but without any real apparent
reason, the letters from David Gill to Kapteyn – and only those letters – have
been preserved in the archives of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen. I have scanned them and made them publicly available in
electronic form on the Kapteyn Webpage.
• Kapteyn’s scientific publications are for a large part available electronically
on the Astronomy Data System (ADS; see below). References and links can
be found on the Kapteyn Webpage; where articles are not available in ADS,
I have in some cases (especially Dutch language popular articles) made them
available there electronically.
Astronomy is in the fortunate circumstance that almost all of the professional literature, as far as it has appeared in scientific (and also many popular)
journals or as observatory or institute publications or (annual) reports, has been
scanned and made available electronically. If applicable, this even goes back to
the eighteenth or nineteenth century. This project, the Harvard–Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics/National Aeronautics and Space Agency Astrophysics
Data System (SAO/NASA ADS, or ADS for short) is available free of charge
to anyone up to the year in which magazine publishers have introduced electronic subscriptions. In the latter case, a link to the magazine’s site is provided;
sometimes it is available in the framework of Open Access, but in some cases
such a subscription is be required. Recently, for most astronomical journals,
the articles are made available one year after publication as part of Open