Fastie and his wife Frances raised two sons and a daughter. Fastie died in Baltimore of pneumonia on July 14, 2000.
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His name is associated with the "Ebert-Fastie spectrometer", an optical device built by William George Fastie of Johns Hopkins University based on Ebert's design of a monochromator in 1889,UNIS Spec4XP The Ebert-Fastie Spectrometer Control Hardware and Software and "Ebert's apparatus", an electrometer used to measure the concentration of atmospheric ions.
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Fastie was one of four children of William Ferdinand and Carolyn Fastie. He attended Johns Hopkins University between 1934 and 1941, initially at evening classes and later as a graduate student in physics, supervised by August Herman Pfund, Robert W. Wood, and Gerhard Heinrich Dieke.
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Known today as the Ebert-Fastie spectrometer, it has a design similar to that described by Hermann Ebert in the early 1900s. Fastie's interests also moved to astronomy in the 1960s, and he designed a number of precision-pointing telescopes whose designs are still used in sounding rockets. In 1977 NASA appointed Fastie as a member of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) science working group.
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In 1979, the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc suggested Hopkins as the home for the Space Telescope Science Institute. Fastie provided a detailed formulation for the proposal. The bio-luminescence of Chesapeake Bay was added to his list of interests, as was the development of new designs of spectroscope. Fastie retired from Hopkins in 1982, but continued to work on campus for another 15 years.
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William George Fastie (6 December 1916 - 14 July 2000) was an American optical physicist and spectroscopist who played a part in the Johns Hopkins University space program of the late 1950s.
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Hubble's ACS/HRC captures Mars during its 2003 opposition, yielding the sharpest visible-light color (RGB) photo yet taken from Earth. At about 8 km / pixel, various martian craters and markings are revealed. The ACS "Fastie finger" is blocking light on the left.Hubblesite - Sharpest Ever Color View of Mars Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope in space on Astro-1, Space Shuttle mission STS-35 in 1990 During World War II, Fastie work in the department of physics involved the development of infrared detectors.
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He contributed to the design of the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope, used on the Space shuttle in December 1990 and March 1995. The 'Fastie Finger', a device in the Advanced Camera for Surveys used for masking unwanted bright astronomical light sources used, is named after him.
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The Horizon Ultraviolet Program (HUP) demonstrated the ability to measure the spatial and spectral characteristics of the Earth's horizon in the vacuum ultraviolet wavelength. The sensor was an Ebert-Fastie spectrometer telescope. Francis Leblanc and Robert E. Huffman of the Phillips Laboratory were Principal Investigators.
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The first spot was the most popular of the two, for example, for imaging circumstellar disks around nearby bright stars or the host galaxies of luminous quasars. The second was the so- called Fastie Finger, 0.8" in width and 5" in length, located at the entrance of the HRC dewar window.
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At the end of the War he joined Leeds & Northrup as a research physicist, but was lured back to Hopkins in 1951 by the professor of physics, John D. Strong. Fastie's first publication described a new design of spectrometer which today bears his name. With the launch of Sputnik 1, Fastie saw the potential of spectroscopy from space, and started a program at Hopkins to develop this idea. Initially concentrating on spectroscopic analysis of the Earth's upper atmosphere, it soon broadened into a full-fledged astronomy program, using accurately pointed telescopes. He contributed to the Mariner 5 flyby of Venus in 1967, and the Mariner 6 and 7 flybys of Mars in 1969, as well as heading the ultraviolet spectrometer experiment on Apollo 17 in 1972 - the missions using ultraviolet spectrometers designed by Fastie in 1952.
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Hubble's ACS/HRC captures Mars during its 2003 opposition, yielding the sharpest visible-light color (RGB) photo yet taken from Earth. At about 8 km / pixel, various martian craters and markings are revealed. The ACS "Fastie finger" is blocking light on the left. The HRC, which has been permanently disabled since 2007 due to an electrical fault, provided ultra-sharp views over a smaller field-of-view.
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ACS fastie finger intrudes it achieved a spatial scale of 5 miles, or 8 kilometres per pixel at full resolution. The history of Mars observation is about the recorded history of observation of the planet Mars. Some of the early records of Mars' observation date back to the era of the ancient Egyptian astronomers in the 2nd millennium BCE. Chinese records about the motions of Mars appeared before the founding of the Zhou Dynasty (1045 BCE).
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Diagram of a Czerny–Turner monochromator A combined reflecting-focusing diffraction grating A Fastie–Ebert monochromator. This is similar to the Czerny–Turner but uses a common collimator/refocusing mirror. In the common Czerny–Turner design, the broad-band illumination source (A) is aimed at an entrance slit (B). The amount of light energy available for use depends on the intensity of the source in the space defined by the slit (width × height) and the acceptance angle of the optical system.
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The spectrograph has been designed and constructed for UV echelle line profile measurements with long-slit imaging. The Ebert-Fastie configuration employed in the design of the spectrograph has many characteristics well suited to the science needs of this mission. Symmetric off-axis reflections from a single collimating mirror are employed to remove aberrations: the spatial resolution is limited by the telescope and the spectral resolution by the grating and aperture characteristics. Use of a paraboloidal collimator, has produced 2 arc sec image quality with minimal astigmatism along the central 2–3 arc min.
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