Harry Raymond (1876-1961)

A great “thank you” to Dorothy Matsui of Redmond, WA, for finding us and sending us material from her grandfather, Harry Raymond.  Raymond was an astronomer for Dudley from 1905 until 1939, meaning his career spans the creation of the General Catalog.  Raymond’s memoirs will hopefully fill in some of the gaps in our understanding of this period.

Harry was a Harvard graduate who was brought in to help with the Carnegie funded cataloging of stars, something that ended up becoming his career.  In 1926 he and fellow Dudley astronomer Ralph E. Wilson won the Gold Medal of the  Royal Danish Academy of Sciences for determining the proper motion of the sun. The Royal Academy had issued a challenge in 1923, pointing out an unresolved conflict between the apparent motions of stars directly in the sun’s path and the stars at right angles to the sun.  This conflict made it impossible to determine the exact speed on our sun’s motion through the galaxy, which was a vital number for much of the astronomical work being done at the time.  Using Dudley’s highly accurate measurements of stellar motions, Raymond and Wilson were able to make the conflict go away.

During his time at Dudley, Raymond courted and married Adelaide “Addie” Pearl Sweet.  Included with his memoir was some of their correspondence, which mysteriously don’t talk about astronomy much.