Smiley, Charles Hugh

Born Camden, Missouri, USA, 6 September 1903

Died Providence, Rhode Island, USA, 26 July 1977

After receiving his Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of California in Berkeley, American mathematician Charles Smiley traveled and worked extensively in Europe, including on assignments at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, where he worked with Leslie Comrie and Andrew Crommelin , and at Cracow, Poland, where he did orbital calculations with Thaddeus Banachiewicz for the then recently discovered Pluto. On his return to the United States, Smiley accepted a professorship at Brown University, where his primary research involved observing 15 solar eclipses. In 1937, Smiley successfully photographed the zodiacal light during a total solar eclipse. He used a Schmidt camera of his own design and construction, a very early application of such cameras.

Also interested in ancient astronomies, Smiley in 1960 published a correlation of the Mayan and Christian calendars based exclusively on astronomical...