Czech Astronomer Jiří Krpata Has Passed Away
Czech astronomer Jiří Krpata, a kind and modest person, died suddenly on February 6, 2009. All 20 published papers which he co-authored between 1971 and 2006 are devoted to Be stars and especially to the discoveries and follow up studies of binaries among them. Jiří Krpata was born on April 10, 1941. He specialized in nuclear physics in secondary school and then studied at the faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University where he graduated in 1964. Although he had been interested in astronomy since childhood, he ended up as a secondary-school teacher in a small town in Western Bohemia. In 1967, he received an offer from Dr. Mirek Plavec to work in the stellar department of the Astronomical Institute in Ondřejov. At the time Mirek gradually built a team to operate and scientifically use the newly delivered 2-m reflector with three spectrographs. Jiří accepted and became the staff member for more than 15 years. It is necessary to explain that Jiří was a man of principles and unwilling to collaborate with the authoritative communist regime of that era. Since an inevitable part of the PhD study at that time was to pass an exam on the Marxist-Leninist philosophy, Jiří never considered the possibility to enter a postgraduate study. As a consequence, he only had a position of a research assistant all the time. His first task in the department was to develop programs and procedures that would facilitate the obtaining and reduction of stellar spectra. He was very active in this area and his nomograms allowed the choice of a proper grating angle for the given spectral region and the identification of lines in the comparison spectra. His first program for the reduction of radial-velocity measurements has been used for many years. Jiří was always very orderly if not pedantic in his work and tried to make his programs user-friendly but also fool-proof. At the same time, he also had a specific sense of humor. In his program KRA6 for the radial-velocity reductions, the dispersion was modeled by a polynomial fit up to tenth power to also allow the reductions of prismatic spectra. The user could choose the degree of the polynomial and if he or she requested a polynomial of higher than tenth power, the program stopped with a remark: "Wake up and choose a better degree!" When Mirek Plavec left for the United States of America after the Soviet-led invasion to Czechoslovakia in 1968, Jiří started a close collaboration with Dr. Pavel Koubský, Mr. František Žďárský, and me on systematic studies of selected Northern Be stars in an effort to prove their duplicity. At the beginning, we had a good luck and were able to announce discoveries of duplicity for 88 Her and 4 Her in 1972 and 1973, respectively. Jiří was a very careful measurer of radial velocities with the Abbe comparators, the only devices available to us for the radial-velocity work at that time. He measured several hundreds of spectra and I believe that statistically his measurements were the most accurate of all four of us. Jiří also developed the program SPEFO for spectrophotometric reductions of the spectra recorded with a five-channel microdensitometer built by Mr. Josef Zicha in Ondřejov. Since the almost daily commuting between Prague and Ondřejov on buses had some adverse effects on his stomach, Jiří decided to end his carrier of astronomer in 1982 and accepted a position of a programmer in Prague. After I also left the Ondřejov Observatory in 1999 to join the Astronomical Institute of the Charles University in Prague, I approached Jiří with the proposal that he accept a job at the Institute to work on the stellar spectra and to develop some reduction programs. He agreed and became a staff member in July 2003. It is necessary to explain that after Jiří left Ondřejov and the first personal computers became available, one of our colleagues, Dr. Jiří Horn, developed a brand new interactive and a very user-friendly program for complete spectra reduction, including the radial-velocity, intensity and equivalent-width measurements, which he also called SPEFO. Very regrettably, Dr. Jiří Horn died after a series of heart attacks on December 13, 1994. When Jiří Krpata started his work at the Astronomical Institute of the Charles University, he gradually studied the new SPEFO program written by Jiří Horn and came to develop it further. He had been quite successful and the latest versions of SPEFO are even more user-friendly and provide a large scale of possibilities. The program is not only used by our students and colleagues in Ondřejov, but also at several other observatories all over the globe. Jiří also improved substantially a control program of the photoelectric photometer attached to a 0.65-m reflector at Hvar, Croatia (the original program being also written by the late Jiří Horn). He and I had a number of ideas how to still improve SPEFO and planned to write also a detailed manual for the new users. On February 5, Jiří came to my office to announce me a sad news that one of our school mates from our university studies died. I could not know that I would also see him for the last time... Jiří was a very friendly and modest person. He had better and worse times in his life. He has two adult children, a son and a daughter, from his first marriage whom he loved very much as I know from our conversations. Later, he was divorced. His second wife died a few years ago (when he already worked at the Charles University). Then it was only his family and work that kept him running in spite of all that had happened. During the years spent at the University, Jiří was an early bird and used to be among the first to come to the office in the morning. He was preparing his cup of tea and was very happy if he was the very first person to come. It is hard to believe that he will no longer welcome us at the entrance hall. All of us will miss him for a long time.... |
Last modified: March 12, 2009
David McDavid