Robert Grant Aitken (December 31 1864 – October 29 1951) was an American astronomer.

He worked at Lick Observatory. He systematically studied double stars, measuring their positions and calculating their orbits around one another. He methodically created a very large catalog of such stars, with the orbit information enabling astronomers to calculate stellar mass statistics for a large number of stars.

Aitken also measured positions and computed orbits for comets and natural satellites of planets.

Aitken won the Bruce Medal in 1926 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1932.

Aitken was partly deaf and used a hearing aid. He married Jessie Thomas around 1888, and had three sons and one daughter. His grandson, Robert Baker Aitken, is a widely-known Zen Buddhist teacher and author.

The asteroid 3070 Aitken is named after him as well as a crater on the Moon, part of the very large South Pole-Aitken basin.

External links

• Bruce Medal page
• Awarding of Bruce Medal
• Awarding of RAS gold medal
• Double Star Oberver, Cataloguer, Statistician, and Observatory Director

Obituaries

• IrAJ 2 (1952) 27 (one paragraph)
• JO 35 (1952) 25 (in French)
• JRASC 46 (1952) 28
• MNRAS 112 (1952) 271
• PASP 64 (1952) 5