Biography
Woolley was born in Weymouth, Dorset and attended Allhallows College then in Honiton for about 18 months, but then moved with his parents to South Africa upon their retirement. There he attended and received his degree from the University of Cape Town. Woolley returned to the United Kingdom and studied at University of Cambridge. After two years at Mount Wilson Observatory he again returned to the United Kingdom in 1931.
From 1937 to 1939 he was Senior Assistant Observer and John Couch Adams Astronomer at the Cambridge Observatory.
Woolley specialized in solar astronomy and in 1939 he was appointed director of the Commonwealth Solar Observatory in Canberra, Australia. He later returned to the United Kingdom to take up his appointment as Astronomer Royal from 1956 to 1971.
Woolley was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1953 and won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1971. From 1972 to 1976 he was director of the new South African Astronomical Observatory. He retired in the late 1970s and spent most of his retirement in South Africa.
Read more about this topic: Richard Van Der Riet Woolley
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