Vitold Ceraski and Vladimir Nikonov – founders of stellar photometry in Russia
✍ Scribed by A. Mironov; I. Pustylnik
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2002
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 510 KB
- Volume
- 323
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0004-6337
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This paper is dedicated to two "godfathers" of astrophotometry in Russia -Vitold Karlovich Ceraski (1849-1925) and Vladimir Borisovich Nikonov (1905-1987). We discuss their scientific legacy and its impact on the formation of the school of stellar photometry in Russia and the USSR. A graduate of Moscow University in 1871, V. Ceraski started his scientific career at the University Astronomical Observatory. Already at the dawn of the 20th century, he was universally regarded as an indisputable authority in Russian astrophotometry. Ceraski introduced essential improvements to K.-F. Zöllner's visual polarimetric photometer. In 1903In -1905 he measured with the photometer the stellar magnitude of the Sun with an accuracy close to its modern value (within a 5% margin) by carefully comparing the brightness of Venus with that of the speck of sunlight reflected from a convex glass surface (during daytime) and by comparing the brightness of Venus with that of the brightest stars (during the night). V. Nikonov, a graduate of Leningrad University, embarked in 1925 on scientific investigations in the Leningrad Astronomical Institute. In 1937, he constructed the first photoelectric photometer in the USSR. Experiments indicated that its attainable precision for Ñ stars amounted to ¼ Ñ ¼¼¿. It was obvious that therefore one should exercise extreme care in the reduction of stellar magnitudes beyond the earth's upper atmosphere. In 1944 he elaborated a method to account for atmospheric extinction which is now universally known as Nikonov's method. Its underlying idea lies in the observations of all non-variable stars available in the program for different air masses.