Michigan faculty and staff portrait collection
DIRECTOR 1892-1905
Asaph Hall, Jr. was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 6, 1859. He was the son of the famous astronomer, Asaph Hall, Sr., who was trained by Brünnow at the Detroit Observatory and made his career at the United States Naval Observatory. Asaph Hall, Jr. was trained at Harvard and Yale, receiving his doctorate from Yale in 1889. Hall worked as an assistant astronomer at the Naval Observatory before becoming the director of the Detroit Observatory in 1892, following William J. Hussey’s brief term as Acting Director. Upon becoming director, Hall cleaned and readjusted the Observatory’s instruments, resumed Brünnow’s work on the meridian circle telescope, and published widely. When heleft Ann Arbor in 1905, he returned to the Naval Observatory. He retired in 1929 and fell ill and died just a few months later, in 1930.
