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Carl Keenan Seyfert was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on February 11, 1911, the son of a pharmacist. He completed his education through high school in Cleveland. He subsequently went to Harvard, where he initially was interested in medicine but then switched to astronomy. He obtained a B.S., M.S. (1933) and PhD (1936) in astronomy. His Ph.D. thesis was on "Studies of the External Galaxies," which was supervised by Harlow Shapley, and focussed on colors and magnitudes of galaxies.

In 1935 he married Muriel E. Mussells. They had two children, Carl Keenan Seyfert, Jr., and Gail Carol Seyfert.

In 1936, he joined the Yerkes Observatory staff, and helped establish the new McDonald Observatory. He was a staff member at McDonald from 1936 to 1940. There he investigated the properties, in particular spectroscopic properties, of B stars and large PM stars, and did some work on variables. In addition, he studied the distribution of colors, emission nebulae and clusters in galaxies.

From 1940 to 1942 he was at Mt. Wilson Observatory as a National Research Council Fellow. While there, he did pioneering research of nuclear emission in spiral galaxies. This resulted in a 1943 paper on galaxies with bright nuclei that emit light with emission line spectra, and exhibit characteristically broadened emission lines (Seyfert, Carl K., Nuclear Emission in Spiral Nebulae. Astrophysical Journal, 97, 28-40, 1943). These galaxies are since called Seyfert Galaxies. The most prominent example, identified as such by Seyfert, is Messier 77 (NGC 1068).

In 1942, he returned to Cleveland and went to the Case Institute of Technology to teach navigation to armed forces, and to participate in secret military research. Despite wartime, he managed to carry out some astronomical research at the Warner and Swasey Observatory of the Case Institute, equipped with a new Schmidt telescope and objective prism, together with J.J. Nassau and S.W. McCuskey. His research included stars and nebulae in the Andromeda Galaxy M31, spectral luminosity distribution of planetary nebulae, and stellar spectra and luminosity function of stars in the Milky Way. At that time, together with Nassau, he also obtained the first good color photographs of nebulae and stellar spectra.

In 1946, Seyfert joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. At that time, the university only had the small Barnard Observatory, equipped with a 6-inch refractor, which had once been used by Barnard, and only a modest teaching program in astronomy. With considerable vigor, Seyfert starting a new series of courses, and took effort to build a new observatory. The new Arthur J. Dyer Observatory, equipped with a 24-inch reflector telescope, was finally completed in December 1953. Carl Seyfert became director of Dyer Observatory, a post he held for the rest of his life. Research at the new observatory included stellar and galactic astronomy, as well as new instrumentation techniques. In 1951, he observed and described a group of galaxies around NGC 6027, now known as "Seyfert's Sextet." He was involved in several instrumentation innovations, including the use of photomultiplier tubes and television techniques in astronomy, and electronically controled telescope drives. Scientific results were obtained on variable stars, emission B stars in stellar associations, and the Milky Way structure.

Seyfert was a member in several professional societies, including the American Astronomical Society, where he served on the Council from 1955 to 1958, and the British Royal Astronomical Society. He also served in the Associated Universities Incorporated, as a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), and in the Astronomy Advisory Panel of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Carl Seyfert died on June 13, 1960 in Nashville; Tennessee, in an automobile accident, aged 49.

He was honored by the astronomical community by the naming of Moon crater Seyfert (29.1N, 114.6E, 110 km diam) in 1970. The 24-inch telescope at Dyer Observatory for which he had worked so much now carries his name, "Seyfert Telescope." His name is remembered by astronomers by the name of the "Seyfert Sextet" for a group of galaxies he has studied, and most widely by the designation "Seyfert Galaxies" or "Seyfert AGNs" for a class of active galaxies he discovered.

(Adapted from www.seds.org)