Ships
- USS Erben (DD-631) Captain from 9 December 1945
Stanley Porter Wyatt Jr. (1921–6 December 1980) was born at Medford, Massachusetts, graduated from Dartmouth College in 1942, and served as a Navy officer on destroyers in the South Pacific during the Second World War. As a lieutenant he was commanding officer of the destroyer Erben (DD-631) from 9 December 1945 to 20 February 1946, in the weeks after the ship had returned to Long Beach. After the war he became an astronomer, taught at the University of Michigan and from 1953 at the University of Illinois, and wrote Principles of Astronomy, a widely used college textbook.
He was born at Medford, Massachusetts, according to the American Astronomical Society's obituary, the son of Stanley Porter Wyatt Sr. and Maud Scott Norton. The obituary says that he had a childhood interest in astronomy. In 1941, the year before he graduated, he married Catherine J. Barber of New York; the couple's second son, Christopher Monroe, was born in the spring of 1953, and the Dartmouth class notes of that year mention "Kay and Stan Wyatt." They had three sons: Stanley P. Wyatt III, Christopher and Scott E. The sources examined here name no brothers or sisters, and describe nothing else of his boyhood.
At Dartmouth he took an A.B. in English and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was in the class of 1942. The Dartmouth class notes of February 1943 report that "Stan Wyatt's dad writes me that Stan has been sent to Norfolk. He's an ensign." In May 1944 another classmate wrote that Wyatt and another member of the class were "on destroyer duty" in the South Pacific, and the June 1944 notes list him among the class's service promotions as a lieutenant (junior grade). The sources examined here do not name the destroyers in which he served, the offices he held in them or the actions he saw. The American Astronomical Society's obituary says that "his experience as a navigator" influenced his decision to study astronomy.
The commanding officers' list for the Erben, compiled by NavSource, shows Lieutenant Stanley P. Wyatt Jr. in command from 9 December 1945 to 20 February 1946, between Lieutenant Commander William Hutton Snyder and Commander William Henry Deibler Jr. The ship's history, in the Navy's Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, says that in the last months of the war she screened the fast carriers off Japan, reached Tokyo Bay in September 1945, and arrived at Long Beach on 21 October 1945 with passengers from Okinawa; she was decommissioned on 31 May 1946. It records nothing about the weeks of his command, and no log, report or letter from them has been found. The sources that tell of his wartime service say nothing of how or why a lieutenant came to take the ship.
After the war he studied at Harvard, taking a master's degree in 1948 and a doctorate in astronomy in 1950; the Dartmouth class notes of November 1950 record the degree. His thesis, a comparison of photographic and photoelectric photometry, was supervised by Harlow Shapley and Bart Bok. He taught for three years at the University of Michigan and joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1953, when the astronomy department, according to the obituary, "was essentially a single astronomer teaching two courses barely reaching 25 students." He worked on the growth of the program, helped add a Ph.D. program, and had as his first doctoral student, in 1962, Ronald Schorn. His research ranged over comet dynamics, galactic structure, Mira variable stars and the Poynting–Robertson effect on meteor orbits, the last in work with Fred Whipple.
He wrote several textbooks, of which Principles of Astronomy (1964, with two later editions) became one of the most widely used introductory texts, and he later worked with James B. Kaler on a shorter version published in 1974. In 1960 he became co-director, with the education professor J. Myron Atkin, of the National Science Foundation's Elementary School Science Project, and in the summer of 1962 the Dartmouth class notes found him at Falmouth on Cape Cod, writing and rewriting astronomy books for children with a group of scientists and teachers. "Stan believes," the class secretary reported, "the time to start teaching students science is at the age of eight and he is doing something about it."
A former student, Samuel Bauer, remembered "Wyatt was a man among men, gentle, jovial, and very student oriented, his lectures were well structured and delivered with confidence and a lot of humor." Another, Bill Pohnan, said that Wyatt "had a proper New England way of speaking and was precise with his words." He died on Saturday, 6 December 1980, aged fifty-nine. The Illinois astronomy department remembers him with an annual award for the undergraduate with the highest grade average and research excellence.