Charlotte Moore Sitterly

Charlotte Moore Sitterly was a scientist in an era when it was rare for a woman to have the opportunity to devote her life to forefront science. Following her graduation from Swarthmore College in 1920, she accepted a position at Princeton University as an assistant to Henry Norris Russell. In 1925 she started a study of the solar spectrum. She could then not know that she would devote much of her scientific career to gathering basic atomic data that are invaluable to the scientific community, even today. In 1931 she obtained a Ph.D. degree at the University of California, Berkeley, and returned to Princeton as a staff member of the Princeton University Observatory. In 1945 Moore moved to the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), to supervise preparation of the widely-used tables of atomic energy levels. Following the successful launching (1946) of a V2 rocket to obtain the ultraviolet spectrum of the Sun, she started working also with Richard Tousey and his group at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). Ultimately, they extended the solar spectrum down to 2200 angstroms. She continued her affiliations with both the NBS and the NRL until her death in 1990. Charlotte Moore was a rare scientist who devoted her career to obtaining accurate numbers, thus enabling the scientific community to open her tables and know that the data are reliable.