5
Nearly Half a Million Stars
Stars everywhere.
So many stars that I could not for the life of me understand
how the sky could contain them all, yet be so black.
Peter Watts (b. 1958).
His path was marked by the stars in the southern hemisphere.
Paul Simon (b. 1941)
By the end of 1879 Kapteyn had settled down. By now he had been a professor
for almost two years, was married and together with his wife had set up a
household. So, what now? There still was no observatory, and it did not look
as if there was ever going to be one. It is sometimes been stated that he spent
the following years in relative idleness, until at the end of 1885 he heard by
chance of a proposal to map the southern sky with photographic plates and
in an impulse offered his help. This suggestion, as well as the idea that he
had accidentally ended up in astronomy, is incorrectly presented in Henriette
Hertzsprung–Kapteyn’s biography [1] and in a number of obituaries. It is true
that he did some work that was not directly related to astronomy, but he
certainly also did important astronomical research. I will start with the first.
Peter Watts is a Canadian science fiction writer and biologist.
From the song African skies of the album Graceland by Paul Simon.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license
to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
P. C. van der Kruit, Pioneer of Galactic Astronomy: A Biography of Jacobus C. Kapteyn,
Springer Biographies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55423-1_5
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