Redman, Roderick Oliver (1905-1975)

English astronomer who was chiefly interested in stellar spectroscopy and the development of spectroscopic techniques, and in solar physics.

Redman was born in Gloucestershire and studied at Cambridge under English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington. Redman worked mainly at the Cambridge observatories and organized their re-equipping after World War II. He became professor 1947 and in 1972 was made director of the amalgamated observatories and Institute of Theoretical Physics. He also established a solar observatory in Malta.

Redman applied the method of photographic photometry to the study of elliptical galaxies and in the 1940s, in Pretoria, South Africa, also to the study of bright stars, for which he developed the narrow-band technique, which was of great value in stellar photometry.

He went all over the world in order to observe total eclipses of the Sun, during which he was able to identify thousands of the emission lines in the chromospheric spectrum and to investigate the chromospheric temperature.

Redman's final contribution to astronomy was his initiation of a large stellar photometry programme.