The Evolution of Stars

Graham Hill received a BSc at Auckland University, New Zealand, before obtaining his MA from the University of Minnesota and a PhD from the University of Texas in Austin. His interest has always been in stellar astronomy, and he worked for almost 30 years as a stellar spectroscopist at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in British Colombia, Canada. In addition to this work, which took him to diverse mountaintops around the world, he developed software, in part with colleagues. This software was aimed at solving light curves and, later, at the digital analysis of photographic spectra. Always a keen observer, he worked with a colleague to measure interstellar reddening at the North Galactic Pole and, based on spectroscopic data, measured the amount of missing mass in the solar neighbourhood. Over the last 30 years, he has been engaged in observing and deriving masses for eclipsing binaries both within the Milky Way and in the Small Magellanic Cloud, as well as writing software for the abundance analysis of high resolution spectra.