Background
He was born on July 28, 1867 at Steubenville, Ohio, United States, the son of Peter and Elizabeth Dillon McCauley Perrine.
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He was born on July 28, 1867 at Steubenville, Ohio, United States, the son of Peter and Elizabeth Dillon McCauley Perrine.
Soon after graduating from Steubenville High School in 1884 he moved to California, where he continued his technical education through private study and became skilled in photography.
In 1893 Perrine became secretary of the Lick Observatory, Mount Hamilton, California, and in 1895 he was promoted to assistant astronomer and began making observations of comets. He discovered nine comets: 1895 IV, 1896 I, 1896 VII (which has a 6. 4-year period and is now known as comet Perrine-Mrkos, his name being joined with that of the Czechoslovakian astronomer who rediscovered the object in 1955), 1897 I, 1897 III, 1898 I, 1898 VI, 1898 IX, and 1902 III. Perrine also recovered the periodic comets d'Arrest, Pons-Winnecke, Tempel 2, and Holmes at their returns between 1897 and 1899.
In 1900 Perrine observed the total solar eclipse in Georgia. Later that year he took over the research initiated by James E. Keeler, who had died shortly before, making photographic observations with the thirty-six-inch Crossley telescope at Lick. From photographs of the asteroid Eros during its close approach to the earth Perrine made a determination of the solar parallax. In 1901 he led the Lick expedition to Sumatra to observe another total solar eclipse. The principal objectives of this expedition were to photograph the sun's corona and possible undiscovered planets inside the orbit of Mercury. Perrine's photographs with the Crossley reflector clearly showed the expansion of the nebula around the nova of that year in Perseus, and he also obtained spectrograms of that and other novas.
Perrine participated in further eclipse expeditions, to Spain in 1905 and to Flint Island in 1908. An important part of Perrine's work involved the continuation of Keeler's photographic survey of nebulas and star clusters. The results, contained in volume VIII of the Publications of the Lick Observatory (1908), showed that about half a million faint spiral nebulas would be within reach of the Crossley reflector. This provided the first evidence for the existence of an extremely large number of these objects, later identified as galaxies of stars, in the universe.
In 1909 Perrine left Lick and took up the directorship of the Argentine National Observatory at Córdoba. He was the third and last North American director of that observatory. His main task was the completion of the Córdoba Durchmusterung (finally published in 1932) of positions of stars in the southern sky. He was also responsible for the more detailed Córdoba zone catalog and for the Córdoba section of the Astrographic Catalogue (1925 - 1934).
Soon after arriving in Argentina Perrine recognized the need for a southern counterpart to the Crossley reflector. While waiting for the larger instrument Perrine built a thirty-inch reflector and took pioneering photographs of nebulas and star clusters in the southern sky. His name is sometimes associated with a phenomenon that he observed during the course of an hour in one evening in 1916. The object (which was in fact discovered by his assistant A. Estelle Glancy) was quite possibly a comet passing very close to the earth.
By the late 1920's anti-imperialism had become prevalent in Argentina, and politicians in Buenos Aires attacked Perrine and the influence of the United States in Argentine astronomy. In 1931 an attempt was made to assassinate him, and two years later the Argentine congress eliminated his authority. He was forced to retire from the directorship of the Córdoba Observatory in 1936.
Perrine died at Villa General Mitre, Argentina.
Charles Dillon Perrine was an influencial astronomer, his most outstanding achievement was his discovery of two moons of Jupiter, today known as Himalia and Elara. He co-discovered the lost periodic comet 18D/Perrine-Mrkos and several other comets. Antonín Mrkos later named the asteroid 6779 Perrine after him. The lunar crater Perrine is also named after him. During Perrine's tenure as director of the Argentine National Observatory, sixteen volumes of the Resultados of the Argentine National Observatory were published. Besides, he promoted the study of astrophysics in Argentina and pushed for the construction of a large telescope (the Bosque Alegre telescope). He won the Lalande Prize in 1897.
(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
He concluded that it was unlikely that any intramercurial planets as large as twenty-five to thirty miles in diameter exist.
Around 1919 he was one of the relatively few proponents of the idea that the light variation of Cepheid-type stars was a result of eclipses; by 1927 he had changed his views and claimed that essentially all light variation in stars was caused by pulsation and other motions in stellar atmospheres.
In 1905 Perrine married Bell Smith; they had five children.
