Related papers: David Gill - Magnificent and Desirable Astronomer
Sir Arthur Eddington is considered one of the greatest astrophysicist of the twentieth century and yet he gained a stigma when, in the 1930s, he embarked on a quest to develop a unified theory of gravity and quantum mechanics. His attempts…
Observational cosmology of the first decades of the Twentieth Century was dominated by two giants: Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley. Hubble's major contributions were to the study and classification of individual galaxies with large…
Near the end of the 16th century Wilhelm IV, Landgraf von Hessen-Kassel, set up an observatory with the main goal to increase the accuracy of stellar positions primarily for use in astrology and for calendar purposes. A new star catalogue…
By the twelfth century, northern European scholars gradually embraced Arabic innovations in science and technology. England naturally developed into a significant centre of the new learning in western Europe. Hereford, and specifically its…
Felix de Roy (1883-1942), an internationality recognised amateur astronomer, made significant contributions to variable star research. As an active observer, he made some 91,000 visual estimates of a number of different variable stars. A…
Allan Sandage was an observational astronomer who was happiest at a telescope. On Hubble's sudden death Allan Sandage inherited the programmes using the world's largest optical telescope at Palomar to determine the distances and number…
On 13 May 1787, a convict fleet of 11 ships left Portsmouth, England, on a 24,000 km, 8-month-long voyage to New South Wales. The voyage would take the "First Fleet" under Captain Arthur Phillip via Tenerife (Canary Islands), the port of…
As the European maritime powers expanded their reach beyond north Atlantic coastal waters to distant lands as far away as the East Indies, access to a practical means of maritime navigation in the southern hemisphere became imperative. The…
John Ellard Gore FRAS, MRIA (1845-1910) was an Irish amateur astronomer and prolific author of popular astronomy books. His main observational interest was variable stars, of which he discovered several, and he served as the first Director…
The Reverend Walter Bidlake, MA, FRAS, JP (1865-1938) was vicar of Crewe, England, for some 21 years. A member of the BAA, he was a keen amateur astronomer with an interest in celestial photography. At the request of another well-known BAA…
William Wilson Morgan was one of the great astronomers of the twentieth century. He considered himself a morphologist, and was preoccupied throughout his career with matters of classification. Though his early life was difficult, and his…
The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) is one of the most productive and influential photometric sky surveys in the history of observational astronomy. Originally designed to detect dark matter through gravitational…
The voyage of the "First Fleet" from Britain to the new colony of New South Wales was not only a military enterprise, it also had a distinct scientific purpose. Britain's fifth Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, had selected William Dawes,…
John Goodricke and Edward Pigott, working in York, England, between 1781 and 1786, determined the periods of variation of eclipsing binaries such as Algol and Beta Lyrae and speculated that the eclipses of Algol might be caused by a "dark…
The separate contributions to cosmology of the above researchers are revisited and a cosmology encompassing their basic ideas is proposed. We study Dirac's article on the large number hypothesis (1938), Sciama's proposal of realizing Mach's…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is the largest and most ambitious optical CCD survey undertaken to date. It will ultimately map out one quarter of the sky with precision photometry in five bands, high-quality astrometry, and spectra of…
Between the 4th and 6th of September 2024, the Astronomy & Astrophysics group at the University of Warwick held a meeting to celebrate 21 years of astronomy at Warwick and the scientific legacy of the late Prof. Tom Marsh, the group…
In 1953 I heard of an experiment in 1925 by Bengt Str\"omgren where he observed transit times with the meridian circle at the Copenhagen University Observatory measuring the current in a photocell behind slits when a star was crossing. In…
Astronomers have long tracked double stars in efforts to find those that are gravitationally-bound binaries and then to determine their orbits. Early catalogues by the Herschels, Struves, and others began with their own discoveries. In 1906…
In this contribution I discuss the Kapteyn Astronomical Laboratory during the period of Pieter Johannes van Rhijn's directorate, which lasted from 1921 to 1957. It had developed under the founder Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn into one of the…