A little boy had been pawing over the stock of greeting cards at a stationery store.
After a few minutes the clerk became curious and asked, "Just what is it you're looking for, sonny? Birthday greeting? Message to a sick friend? Anniversary congratulations to your mom and dad?"
The boy shook his head, "No."
"Then what kind of card is it that you want?" asked the clerk.
The boy answered wistfully, "Got anything in the line of blank report cards?"
James KeelerBorn 10 Sep 1857; died 12 Aug 1900 at age 42.James Edward Keeler was an American astronomer who confirmed Maxwell's theory that the rings of Saturn were not solid (requiring uniform rotation), but composed of meteoric particles (with rotational velocity given by Kepler's 3rd law). His spectrogram of 9 Apr 1895 of the rings of Saturn showed the Doppler shift indicating variation of radial velocity along the slit. At the age of 21, he observed the solar eclipse of Jul 1878, with the Naval Observatory expedition to Colorado. He directed the Allegheny Observatory (1891-8) and the Lick Observatory from 1898, where, working with the Crossley reflector, he observed large numbers of nebulae whose existence had never before been suspected. He died unexpectedly of a stroke, age 42.« |
