Jan Schilt (3 February 1894,Gouda – 9 January 1982,Englewood, New Jersey) was a Dutch-Americanastronomer, inventor of the Schiltphotometer.[1]
Schilt was born in 1894 in the Netherlands, and educated there underJacobus Kapteyn. After the death of Kapteyn in 1922 he finished his PhD thesis in 1924 withPieter Johannes van Rhijn 'On a Thermo-Electric Method of Measuring Photographic Magnitudes'. This work was mainly done atLeiden Observatory where he stayed from 1922 to 1925.
He emigrated to the United States in 1925, first toMount Wilson Observatory, in 1926 toYale University Observatory and in 1931 he was appointed associated professor atRutherford Observatory.
In 1933 he became the Chair ofColumbia University's astronomy department, a position which he filled until his retirement in 1962, when he was granted the title of Rutherford Professor of Astronomy Emeritus.
Schilt's astronomical work included the invention of the Schiltphotometer, a device which measures the light output (apparent magnitude) of stars on photographic plates, and, indirectly, their distances. He worked on the motions of star streams in theMilky Way Galaxy, and was director of the Yale-Columbia Southern Station inJohannesburg andCanberra, as well as Director of theRutherford Observatory at Columbia.
Schilt was noted at Columbia for walking into his classes the first day after the launch ofSputnik 1 and commenting "Well, gentlemen, it is not every day we have something new in the sky to talk about", following which he devoted the entire class to proving that Sputnik had been deliberately launched into anorbit designed to make it invisible from the United States for as long as possible (six weeks).
13,500 items of his papers are contained in theRare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University.[2]
Asteroid2308 Schilt (1967 JM) was named in his honor.[3]
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