Named in honor of Leif J. Robinson, editor of ’Sky and Telescope’. Robinson’s career as an observer began with a series of planetary drawings and observations of the rapidly changing variable stars in the Orion Nebula. He worked at the Griffith Planetarium in Los Angeles before joining the staff of the magazine in 1962 as an editorial assistant, and he succeeded the late Joseph Ashbrook as editor in 1980.

Named in memory of Harold Spencer Jones (1890-1960), successively astronomical assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, H.M. astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope, and Astronomer Royal (1933-1955).  He also served as president of the IAU (1945-1948).  His work was devoted to fundamental positional astronomy, and he conclusively demonstrated that the small residuals in the apparent motions of the planets were due to the irregular rotation of the earth.

Named in memory of Walter Sydney Adams (1876-1956), whose spectroscopic studies of sunspots and stars led to the discovery, with A. Kohlschutter, of a spectroscopic method for determining stellar distances, the relative intensities of spectral lines being used to determine absolute magnitudes of both giant and main-sequence stars.  Adams identified Sirius B as the first white-dwarf star known, and his measurement of its gravitational redshift was taken as confirming evidence for the general theory of relativity.

Named in memory of Ching-Sung Yu (1897-1978), Chinese-American astrophysicist, whose spectrophotometric measurements of 91 stars at the Lick Observatory in the early 1920s represented a milestone in research on stellar energy distribution.  After returning to China he established the Purple Mountain Observatory and served as its first director.  He also developed the site of what is now the Yunnan Observatory, was director of the Academia Sinica’s Institute of Astronomy and president of the Chinese Astronomical Society.

Named in memory of James Edwin Keeler (1857-1900), pioneer American astrophysicist and second director of the Lick Observatory.  He measured accurately the wavelengths of the chief nebular lines, confirmed spectroscopically the particle nature of Saturn’s rings and recognized the spiral "nebulae" as numerous, important constituents of the universe.  In 1899 he also discovered photographically with the Crossley reflector the faint minor planet (452) Hamiltonia.  Citation prepared by D. E. Osterbrock.

Named in honor of Hendrik Christoffel van de Hulst, husband of Wil van de Hulst (see 2412) and astrophysicist at the Leiden Observatory.  A leader in the development of radioastronomy in the Netherlands, van de Hulst predicted the instellar hydrogen 21-cm line.  He has made contributions to the theory of light scattering by small particles, about which topic he wrote two books. He was active in promoting international cooperation in space research.

Named for William Huggins (1824-1910), pioneer in astronomical spectroscopy.  Huggins stated that the chemical elements on the earth also existed in the stars, discovered the gaseous nature of bright nebulae, was the first to study the spectrum of a nova and measured the radial velocity of Sirius.

Named in honor of Owen Jay Gingerich, Harvard professor of astronomy and of the history of science, and an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.  Although he has made important contributions to the modeling of stellar atmospheres, he is best known for effectively setting the standards of scholarship for modern studies of the history of astronomy and astrophysics.