Born Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, 21 September 1913
Died Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 17 March 2001
Arthur Covington was Canada’s pioneer radio astronomer and one of the first in the world involved in solar radio astronomy. In 1948 he initiated daily monitoring of the solar flux at 10.7 cm, which has been continued to the present day by the National Research Council of Canada [NRC].
Covington grew up in Vancouver. As a boy he was a keen radio amateur and a member of the local Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. A licensed radio operator, he worked on ships of the Canadian National Railway. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of British Columbia, graduating in 1938. After completing his master’s degree in 1940 – he built his own electron microscope – Covington proceeded to Berkeley as a Ph.D. student under J. Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California. There he met and married fellow physics student Charlotte Riche, daughter of the inventor of the snap-action...
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Selected References
Covington, A. E., “Beginnings of Solar Radio Astronomy in Canada,” in W. T. Sullivan, III, ed., The Early Years of Radio Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 317–334.
Gaizauskas, Victor, “Obituary: Arthur Edwin Covington (1913–2001),” Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society 34 (2002), 1357.
Jarrell, Richard A., “The Formative Years of Canadian Radio Astronomy,” Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada 91 (1997), 20–27.
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Jarrell, R.A. (2014). Covington, Arthur Edwin. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_9248
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