Background
Solon Irving Bailey was born on December 29, 1854, in Lisbon, New Hampshire, United States. He was a son of Israel C. and Jane (Sutherland) Bailey.
Bailey (3rd from left) at a picknick near Arequipa/Peru.
Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Solon Bailey received his Bachelor of Arts from Boston University in 1881.
National University of Saint Augustine, Arequipa, Peru
In 1923 Solon Irving Bailey became Doctor of Science, a degree that he received from the University of San Agustin, Peru.
Astronomer meteorologist scientist
Solon Irving Bailey was born on December 29, 1854, in Lisbon, New Hampshire, United States. He was a son of Israel C. and Jane (Sutherland) Bailey.
Solon Bailey received his Bachelor of Arts from Boston University in 1881. He graduated from Boston University with a Master of Arts degree in 1884. In 1923 he became Doctor of Science, a degree that he received from the University of San Agustin, Peru.
Graduating from Boston University with an A.M. degree in 1884. Bailey began a career with the Harvard Observatory that was to last forty-four years. He earned a second A.M. degree from Harvard in 1888 and was then sent to South America by E. C. Pickering (director of the Observatory), to find a suitable location for Harvard’s proposed southern observing post.
Bailey traveled throughout Peru and Chile, trying out various sites. No information on weather patterns was available to make his task easier, so he established a chain of meteorological stations - from sea level up to 19,000 feet. He published the data that he accumulated over the following thirty-seven years in his “Peruvian Meteorology” (1889 to 1930). As a result of his survey, Harvard’s Boyden station, with the 24-inch Bruce doublet as its main telescope, was established near the city of Arequipa in Peru and remained in operation from 1890 until 1927.
Bailey took with him to Peru the visual photometer used for the original “Harvard Photometry,” a compilation of standard magnitudes for stars located north of declination -30° (1884, 1885), and with it completed Harvard’s coverage of the sky (1895). He then began photographing ω Centauri and other globular clusters, to get light curves for over a hundred of the stars now called cluster variables (1902, 1916); this work proved fundamental to estimates of astronomical distances subsequently made by Harlow Shapley and others.
Bailey’s photographs of regions in and away from the plane of the Milky Way were made with exposures ranging up to nineteen hours and twenty-seven minutes (1908, 1913, 1917). They were used for relative star counts and also revealed more than 3,000 new extragalactic objects.
Bailey served as acting director of the Harvard Observatory from 1919 to 1921, between the tenures of Pickering and Shapley. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. After retiring in 1925 he completed his History and Work of the Harvard Observatory, 1839-1927 (1931).
Solon Irving Bailey died at his summer home in Hanover, from an illness caused by heart disease, in 1931.
In 1883 Solon Bailey married Ruth Poulter.
Professor
Doctor of Science