Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory was established in 1890 in Washington, D.C., by Samuel Pierpont Langley, the third secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, for the specific study of the Sun’s radiation. Langley’s successor as observatory director in 1906, Charles Greeley Abbot, limited the…

The headquarters of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, formerly in Washington, D.C., was moved to Cambridge in 1955; it is now part of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

…who, as director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Washington, D.C., for almost four decades, engaged in a career-long campaign to demonstrate that the Sun’s energy output varies and has a measurable effect on the Earth’s weather.

In 1966 the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., U.S., issued a reference star catalog for use in finding artificial satellites from photographs. Although the SAO Star Catalog of 258,997 stars contains no new basic data, it does present the information in a particularly useful form. An accompanying…