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Piet van de Kamp (December 26, 1901 – May 18, 1995), known as Peter van de Kamp in the United States, was a Dutch-American astronomer. He specialized in astrometry, studying parallax and proper motions of stars. In the 1960s he announced that Barnard's star had a planetary companion based on observed "wobbles" in its motion, but this now seems likely to have been spurious.
Life Piet van de Kamp, or Peter as he was called in the United States, arrived at the University of Virginia on March 1, 1923 from the Astronomical Laboratory of Groningen, the Netherlands for a year's residence. His visit was made possible through grants from the Draper Fund of the National Academy of Sciences. He arrived at the Leander McCormick Observatory under the leadership of Samuel Alfred Mitchell and his extensive stellar parallax program. In addition to assisting with the parallax program, van de Kamp assisted Harold Alden with the lengthy Boss star project. After one year at McCormick Observatory, van de Kamp went to the Lick Observatory in California as a Kellogg fellow. There he received his Ph.D. from the University of California in Astronomy in June 1925. Van de Kamp returned to McCormick on October 1, 1925 to take up the position left vacant by Harold Alden, who had just taken up the directorship of the Yale University Observatory Southern Station in Johannesburg, South Africa. His work consisted of assisting with the parallax program and continuing the proper motion work that he and Alden had begun. Van de Kamp and Alexander N. Vyssotsky spent eight years measuring 18,000 proper motions. He did additional, smaller projects individually, including an investigation for general and selective absorption of light within the Galaxy. Van de Kamp was also a very talented musician. He helped to organize an orchestra in Charlottesville, which he conducted and included fellow astronomer Vyssotsky. He also composed music, both for the orchestra and for the piano. His unpublished "Lullaby" can be found at the Music Library at the University of Virginia. At Swarthmore Van de Kamp performed with Peter Schickele, a.k.a. P. D. Q. Bach, and made several films of Schickele's student performance. Barnards Star In the spring of 1937, van de Kamp left McCormick Observatory to take over as director of Swarthmore College's Sproul Observatory. He made observations of Barnard's Star and in the 1960s reported a periodic "wobble" in its motion, apparently due to a planetary companion. It was not until several decades had passed that a consensus had formed that this had been a spurious detection. See: * * and * . Astronomers George Gatewood and Heinrich Eichhorn using data obtained with the Thaw Refractor telescope of the University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, USA) detected a change in the color-dependent image scale of the telescope used by Van de Kamp in his study; this apparently occurred after the objective lens was removed, cleaned, and replaced. Hundreds more stars showed "wobbles" like Barnard's when photographs before and after cleaning were compared - a virtual impossibility. | ||||||||
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