Donald E. Osterbrock Oral History Interview
Interviewed by Shirley K. Cohen
Interview Sessions from 2003
- February 10, 2003
Abstract
In this brief interview, the American astronomer Donald Osterbrock, who died on January 11, 2007, offers recollections of Enrico Fermi and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in the early 1950s at the University of Chicago. He recalls the atmosphere at Yerkes Observatory, where he got his PhD (1952); his postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton (1952-1953); and the five years he spent at Caltech, first as an instructor (1953-1955) and then as an assistant professor (1955-1958). At Caltech, he worked on gaseous nebulae. He recalls that work and comments on Jesse Greenstein’s style as head of the astronomy department. He discusses his various colleagues affiliated with the Carnegie Observatories on Santa Barbara Street in Pasadena, including Walter Baade, Rudolph Minkowski, Armin Deutsch and Maarten Schmidt; his Caltech colleagues Guido Münch, Art Code, and Fritz Zwicky; his two graduate students, George Abell and John Mathis; his decision to leave Caltech in 1958 and help Art Code develop a graduate program in astronomy at the University of Wisconsin.
Archival record in collection guide
PDF version of transcript [0.18 MB]
Preferred Citation
Donald E. Osterbrock Oral History Interview, interviewed by Shirley K. Cohen, Caltech Archives Oral History Project, February 10, 2003, http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Osterbrock_D.
Oral history interviews provide valuable first-hand testimony of the past. The views and opinions expressed in them are those of the interviewees, who describe events based on their own recollections and from their own perspective. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Caltech Archives and Special Collections or of the California Institute of Technology.