Part 2 (Obituaries) - King's College - University of Cambridge

126
OBITUARIES
Working as an astronomer involved a fair amount of globetrotting, and
David and family moved to Texas in 1968, where they had already spent
some time. He became Professor of Astronomy and Associate Director of
McDonald Observatory, where he kept a large pegboard covered in
different-coloured golf tees which he used to schedule telescope time for
McDonald observers. No one except David could ever figure out how
it worked.
David was a central figure in a 1973 expedition to Africa, in which the
Einstein prediction of the effect of the sun’s gravity on bending the path of
light from a star was tested again. He was appointed Jack Josey Centennial
Professor in Texas from 1977 until 1986 when he retired, and had a very
fruitful collaboration with fellow scientists Brian Warner and Ed Nather;
they revived the lunar occultation programme that David had been working
on in South Africa and instruments were developed which enabled the
investigation of objects with rapid light variations. Through their work, the
field of “high-speed astronomy” was born. David had many PhD students
whom he supervised with care and generous hospitality. Some projects
required observations to be made from several different locations, and David
excelled in making the travel arrangements so that some could go to India,
some to South Africa and some to Perth in Australia. He contacted National
Geographic to support the funding, contacted the embassies in the different
countries to expedite the scientists’ passage through customs and contacted
the airlines to make sure that the equipment could be monitored as it
came on and off the planes. The Australians began to recognise the name
Dyvie Divvens.
He was a vibrant and extrovert scientist, renowned for his singing and
humming at home, in the laboratory and in the corridors, which seemed to
get louder as he got older; he could burst into song at any occasion. A
colleague reports how an experiment to measure the angular diameter of a
star seemed to be going badly as a cloud completely covered the view through
the telescope of the target star; but David sang theWelsh hymn God of our Fathers
in stentorian tones and the cloud moved away for just long enough to allow
the measurement to be taken. He also tested the acoustics of a potential