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Alvan Graham Clark
Alvan Graham Clark (July 10, 1832 – June 9, 1897) was an American astronomer and telescope-maker. Biography Alvan Graham Clark was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, the son of Alvan Clark, founder of Alvan Clark & Sons. On January 31, 1862, while testing a new aperture great refractor telescope in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, Clark made the first ever observation of a white dwarf star. This discovery of Sirius B, or affectionately "the Pup", proved an earlier hypotheses (Friedrich Bessel in 1844) that Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky with an apparent magnitude of −1.46, had an unseen companion disturbing its motion. Clark used the largest refracting telescope lens in existence at the time, and the largest telescope in the United States, to observe the magnitude 8 companion. Clark's 18.5 inch refracting telescope was then delivered to his customer, the landmark Dearborn Observatory of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where it is still being used ...
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Fall River, Massachusetts
Fall River is a city in Bristol County, Massachusetts, United States. The City of Fall River's population was 94,000 at the 2020 United States Census, making it the tenth-largest city in the state. Located along the eastern shore of Mount Hope Bay at the mouth of the Taunton River, the city became famous during the 19th century as the leading textile manufacturing center in the United States. While the textile industry has long since moved on, its impact on the city's culture and landscape is still prominent. Fall River's official motto is "We'll Try", dating back to the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1843. Nicknamed The Scholarship City after Irving Fradkin founded Dollars for Scholars there in 1958, mayor Jasiel Correia introduced the "Make It Here" slogan as part of a citywide rebranding effort in 2017. Fall River is known for the Lizzie Borden case, the Fall River cult murders, Portuguese culture, its numerous 19th-century textile mills and Battleship Cove, home of t ...
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Sirius
Sirius is the list of brightest stars, brightest star in the night sky. Its name is derived from the Ancient Greek language, Greek word , or , meaning 'glowing' or 'scorching'. The star is designated α Canis Majoris, Latinisation of names, Latinized to Alpha Canis Majoris, and abbreviated Alpha CMa or α CMa. With a visual apparent magnitude of −1.46, Sirius is almost twice as bright as Canopus, the next brightest star. Sirius is a binary star consisting of a main-sequence star of spectral type A-type main-sequence star, A0 or A1, termed Sirius A, and a faint white dwarf companion of spectral type DA2, termed Sirius B. The distance between the two varies between 8.2 and 31.5 astronomical units as they orbit every 50 years. Sirius appears bright because of its intrinsic luminosity and its proximity to the Solar System. At a distance of , the Sirius system is one of Earth's List of nearest stars, nearest neighbours. Sirius is gradually moving closer to the Solar S ...
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1897 Deaths
Events January–March * January 2 – The International Alpha Omicron Pi sorority is founded, in New York City. * January 4 – A British force is ambushed by Chief Ologbosere, son-in-law of the ruler. This leads to a punitive expedition against Benin. * January 7 – A cyclone destroys Darwin, Australia. * January 8 – Lady Flora Shaw, future wife of Governor General Lord Lugard, officially proposes the name "Nigeria" in a newspaper contest, to be given to the British Niger Coast Protectorate. * January 22 – In this date's issue of the journal ''Engineering'', the word ''computer'' is first used to refer to a mechanical calculation device. * January 23 – Elva Zona Heaster is found dead in Greenbrier County, West Virginia. The resulting murder trial of her husband is perhaps the only capital case in United States history, where spectral evidence helps secure a conviction. * January 31 – The Czechoslovak Trade Union Association is f ...
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1832 Births
Year 183 ( CLXXXIII) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Aurelius and Victorinus (or, less frequently, year 936 ''Ab urbe condita''). The denomination 183 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years. Events By place Roman Empire * An assassination attempt on Emperor Commodus by members of the Senate fails. Births * January 26 – Lady Zhen, wife of the Cao Wei state Emperor Cao Pi (d. 221) * Hu Zong, Chinese general, official and poet of the Eastern Wu state (d. 242) * Liu Zan (Zhengming), Chinese general of the Eastern Wu state (d. 255) * Lu Xun Zhou Shuren (25 September 1881 – 19 October 1936), better known by his pen name Lu Xun (or Lu Sun; ; Wade–Giles: Lu Hsün), was a Chinese writer, essayist, poet, and literary criti ...
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List Of Astronomical Instrument Makers
The following is a list of astronomical instrument makers, along with lifespan and country of work, if available. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z See also * History of the telescope * List of largest optical reflecting telescopes * List of largest optical refracting telescopes * List of observatory codes * List of Russian astronomers and astrophysicists * List of telescope types * Space telescope * Timeline of telescopes, observatories, and observing technology External links {{DEFAULTSORT:Astronomical Instrument Makers Technology-related lists Instrument makers Lists of manufacturers Astronomical instruments Astronomical instruments include: *Alidade *Armillary sphere * Astrarium *Astrolabe *Astronomical clock *the Antikythera mechanism, an astronomical clock *Blink comparator * Bolometer *the Canterbury Astrolabe Quadrant *Celatone *Celestial sph ...
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The Boston Globe
''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Globe'' is the oldest and largest daily newspaper in Boston. Founded in 1872, the paper was mainly controlled by Irish Catholic interests before being sold to Charles H. Taylor and his family. After being privately held until 1973, it was sold to ''The New York Times'' in 1993 for $1.1billion, making it one of the most expensive print purchases in U.S. history. The newspaper was purchased in 2013 by Boston Red Sox and Liverpool owner John W. Henry for $70million from The New York Times Company, having lost over 90% of its value in 20 years. The newspaper has been noted as "one of the nation's most prestigious papers." In 1967, ''The Boston Globe'' became the first major paper in the U.S. to come out against the Vietnam War. The paper's 2002 c ...
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Evanston, Illinois
Evanston ( ) is a city, suburb of Chicago. Located in Cook County, Illinois, United States, it is situated on the North Shore along Lake Michigan. Evanston is north of Downtown Chicago, bordered by Chicago to the south, Skokie to the west, Wilmette to the north, and Lake Michigan to the east. Evanston had a population of 78,110 . Founded by Methodist business leaders in 1857, the city was incorporated in 1863. Evanston is home to Northwestern University, founded in 1851 before the city's incorporation, one of the world's leading research universities. Today known for its socially liberal politics and ethnically diverse population, Evanston was historically a dry city, until 1972. The city uses a council–manager system of government and is a Democratic stronghold. The city is heavily shaped by the influence of Chicago, externally, and Northwestern, internally. The city and the university share a historically complex long-standing relationship. History Prior to the 1830s, ...
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Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Chartered by the Illinois General Assembly in 1851, Northwestern was established to serve the former Northwest Territory. The university was initially affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal Church but later became non-sectarian. By 1900, the university was the third largest university in the United States. In 1896, Northwestern became a founding member of the Big Ten Conference, and joined the Association of American Universities as an early member in 1917. The university is composed of eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools, which include the Kellogg School of Management, the Pritzker School of Law, the Feinberg School of Medicine, the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, the Bienen School of Music, the McCormick ...
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Dearborn Observatory
The Dearborn Observatory is an astronomical observatory located on the Evanston, Illinois, Evanston campus of Northwestern University. The observatory was originally constructed in 1888, through an agreement between the university and the Chicago Astronomical Society. In the summer of 1939, Dearborn Observatory had to be moved to make way for the construction of the Technological Institute. The 1888 observatory is the second Dearborn Observatory, the first had been erected on the Old University of Chicago campus. The observatory is home the Dearborn 18 1/2 inch refractor, which was the largest telescope in the United States in the late 1860s. Due to the complicated history, it was operated from a different site at that time, and the original tube and mounting is at the Adler Planetarium since 1929. The 18 1/2 was used to discover Sirius, Sirius B, a companion to the brightest star in the night sky. The 18 1/2 was the largest telescope in the Americas for many years until the U.S. ...
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Apparent Magnitude
Apparent magnitude () is a measure of the brightness of a star or other astronomical object observed from Earth. An object's apparent magnitude depends on its intrinsic luminosity, its distance from Earth, and any extinction of the object's light caused by interstellar dust along the line of sight to the observer. The word ''magnitude'' in astronomy, unless stated otherwise, usually refers to a celestial object's apparent magnitude. The magnitude scale dates back to the ancient Roman astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, whose star catalog listed stars from 1st magnitude (brightest) to 6th magnitude (dimmest). The modern scale was mathematically defined in a way to closely match this historical system. The scale is reverse logarithmic: the brighter an object is, the lower its magnitude number. A difference of 1.0 in magnitude corresponds to a brightness ratio of \sqrt /math>, or about 2.512. For example, a star of magnitude 2.0 is 2.512 times as bright as a star of magnitude 3.0, 6. ...
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Friedrich Bessel
Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (; 22 July 1784 – 17 March 1846) was a German astronomer, mathematician, physicist, and geodesist. He was the first astronomer who determined reliable values for the distance from the sun to another star by the method of parallax. A special type of mathematical functions were named Bessel functions after Bessel's death, though they had originally been discovered by Daniel Bernoulli and then generalised by Bessel. Life and family Bessel was born in Minden, Westphalia, then capital of the Prussian administrative region Minden-Ravensberg, as second son of a civil servant into a large family. At the age of 14 Bessel was apprenticed to the import-export concern Kulenkamp at Bremen. The business's reliance on cargo ships led him to turn his mathematical skills to problems in navigation. This in turn led to an interest in astronomy as a way of determining longitude. Bessel came to the attention of a major figure of German astronomy at the time, Heinric ...
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White Dwarf
A white dwarf is a stellar core remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. A white dwarf is very dense: its mass is comparable to the Sun's, while its volume is comparable to the Earth's. A white dwarf's faint luminosity comes from the emission of residual thermal energy; no fusion takes place in a white dwarf. The nearest known white dwarf is at 8.6 light years, the smaller component of the Sirius binary star. There are currently thought to be eight white dwarfs among the hundred star systems nearest the Sun. The unusual faintness of white dwarfs was first recognized in 1910. The name ''white dwarf'' was coined by Willem Luyten in 1922. White dwarfs are thought to be the final evolutionary state of stars whose mass is not high enough to become a neutron star or black hole. This includes over 97% of the other stars in the Milky Way. After the hydrogen- fusing period of a main-sequence star of low or medium mass ends, such a star will expand to a red giant ...
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