Henry Draper

Henry Draper was born in Virginia on March 7th, 1837. He was training to be a medical doctor, and graduated from NYU School of medicine in 1857. While traveling in Ireland, he met the Third Earl of Rosse, who got him interested in astronomy. In 1872, He took the first photograph of a stellar spectrum, using a custom built telescope and spectrograph to capture the absorption lines of Vega. In 1874 he organized an expedition to photograph the transit of Venus, a feat that he was later awarded a medal from congress for. Six years later, he took the first photograph of the Great Orion Nebula, the first time a deep sky object had been photographed, and two years later he took a much improved photo, both times using 50 minute exposures. In 1881, he took the first wide-angle photo of a comets tail, and also the first spectroscopic analysis of a comets nucleus. After his death in 1882, his widow funded a prize, the Henry Draper Medal, given to those who change the understanding of astrophysics, and a telescope which was used to catalog the spectra of as many stars as possible, which were put into a catalog bearing his name which was completed in 1924, and later updated once in 1936, and again in 1949. The catalog listed the spectral analysis of nearly all the stars visible up to a magnitude of 9, totaling 359,083 stars.