Charlotte Moore Sitterly, Astronomer
Near Intercourse, Pennsylvania
Charlotte Moore Sitterly was born in eighteen ninety-eight in Ercildoun, in East Fallowfield Township, and grew up attending Fallowfield Friends Meeting nearby. She became one of the foremost authorities on the solar spectrum in the twentieth century, authoring more than one hundred books and articles as a career physicist with the Bureau of Standards in Washington.
In nineteen thirty-seven she received the American Astronomical Society's Annie Jump Cannon Award for her painstaking work cataloguing spectral lines. Twelve years later, in nineteen forty-nine, she became the first woman elected an associate of the Royal Astronomical Society of Great Britain. Sitterly's work was the kind of precise, slow, unspectacular science that makes everything else in astronomy possible. She died in nineteen ninety, having spent nearly sixty years mapping the sun.
