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James Ferguson (American Astronomer)
James Ferguson (August 31, 1797 – September 26, 1867) was a Scottish-born American astronomer and engineer, who made the first discovery of an asteroid from North America (31 Euphrosyne). Biography James Ferguson was born in Scotland on August 31, 1797, and his family moved to the United states in 1800. Between the ages of 17 and 19, as an assistant engineer, he helped to build the Erie Canal. Afterwards he was appointed as an astronomical surveyor, surveying the U.S. Northwest boarder as part of the Treaty of Ghent Starting in 1847, he worked at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. He worked on the 9.6 inch refractor telescope. Ferguson was confirmed at the Church of the Epiphany in 1863. Ferguson was considered a bright human computer, computer and had written 84 papers as well as contributions to scientific magazines. Discoveries Throughout the years, Ferguson discovered three minor planets. The first, 31 Euphrosyne, is the first numbered minor planet to be di ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Perthshire
Perthshire (locally: ; gd, Siorrachd Pheairt), officially the County of Perth, is a historic county and registration county in central Scotland. Geographically it extends from Strathmore in the east, to the Pass of Drumochter in the north, Rannoch Moor and Ben Lui in the west, and Aberfoyle in the south; it borders the counties of Inverness-shire and Aberdeenshire to the north, Angus to the east, Fife, Kinross-shire, Clackmannanshire, Stirlingshire and Dunbartonshire to the south and Argyllshire to the west. It was a local government county from 1890 to 1930. Perthshire is known as the "big county", or "the Shire", due to its roundness and status as the fourth largest historic county in Scotland. It has a wide variety of landscapes, from the rich agricultural straths in the east, to the high mountains of the southern Highlands. Administrative history Perthshire was an administrative county between 1890 and 1975, governed by a county council. Initially, Perthshire Count ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
50 Virginia
Virginia (minor planet designation: 50 Virginia) is a large, very dark main belt asteroid. It was discovered by American astronomer James Ferguson on October 4, 1857, from the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. German astronomer Robert Luther discovered it independently on October 19 from Düsseldorf, and his discovery was announced first. The reason for Virginia's name is not known; it may be named after Verginia, the Roman noblewoman slain by her father, but it may alternatively have been named after the American state of Virginia. Photometric observations of this asteroid at the Organ Mesa Observatory in Las Cruces, New Mexico, during 2008 gave a light curve with a period of 14.315 ± 0.001 hours and a brightness variation of 0.19 ± 0.02 in magnitude. The shape of the light curve at the maximum was found to change with phase angle. The orbit of 50 Virginia places it in an 11:4 mean motion resonance with the planet Jupiter. The computed Lyapunov time for th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Discoverers Of Asteroids
Discovery is the act of detecting something new, or something previously unrecognized as meaningful. With reference to sciences and academic disciplines, discovery is the observation of new phenomena, new actions, or new events and providing new reasoning to explain the knowledge gathered through such observations with previously acquired knowledge from abstract thought and everyday experiences. A discovery may sometimes be based on earlier discoveries, collaborations, or ideas. Some discoveries represent a radical breakthrough in knowledge or technology. New discoveries are acquired through various senses and are usually assimilated, merging with pre-existing knowledge and actions. Questioning is a major form of human thought and interpersonal communication, and plays a key role in discovery. Discoveries are often made due to questions. Some discoveries lead to the invention of objects, processes, or techniques. A discovery may sometimes be based on earlier discoveries, collab ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
19th-century American Astronomers
The 19th (nineteenth) century began on 1 January 1801 (Roman numerals, MDCCCI), and ended on 31 December 1900 (Roman numerals, MCM). The 19th century was the ninth century of the 2nd millennium. The 19th century was characterized by vast social upheaval. Slavery was abolitionism, abolished in much of Europe and the Americas. The Industrial Revolution, First Industrial Revolution, though it began in the late 18th century, expanding beyond its British homeland for the first time during this century, particularly remaking the economies and societies of the Low Countries, the Rhineland, Northern Italy, and the Northeastern United States. A few decades later, the Second Industrial Revolution led to ever more massive urbanization and much higher levels of productivity, profit, and prosperity, a pattern that continued into the 20th century. The Gunpowder empires, Islamic gunpowder empires fell into decline and European imperialism brought much of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and almost ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1867 Deaths
Events January–March * January 1 – The John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge, Covington–Cincinnati Suspension Bridge opens between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Covington, Kentucky, in the United States, becoming the longest single-span bridge in the world. It was renamed after its designer, John A. Roebling, in 1983. * January 8 – African-American men are granted the right to vote in the District of Columbia. * January 11 – Benito Juárez becomes Mexican president again. * January 30 – Emperor Kōmei of Japan dies suddenly, age 36, leaving his 14-year-old son to succeed as Emperor Meiji. * January 31 – Maronite nationalist leader Youssef Bey Karam leaves Lebanon aboard a French ship for Algeria. * February 3 – ''Shōgun'' Tokugawa Yoshinobu abdicates, and the late Emperor Kōmei's son, Prince Mutsuhito, becomes Emperor Meiji of Japan in a brief ceremony in Kyoto, ending the Late Tokugawa shogunate. * February 7 – West Virginia University is established in Morgan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1797 Births
Events January–March * January 3 – The Treaty of Tripoli, a peace treaty between the United States and Ottoman Tripolitania, is signed at Algiers (''see also'' 1796). * January 7 – The parliament of the Cisalpine Republic adopts the Italian green-white-red tricolour as the official flag (this is considered the birth of the flag of Italy). * January 13 – Action of 13 January 1797, part of the War of the First Coalition: Two British Royal Navy frigates, HMS ''Indefatigable'' and HMS ''Amazon'', drive the French 74-gun ship of the line '' Droits de l'Homme'' aground on the coast of Brittany, with over 900 deaths. * January 14 – War of the First Coalition – Battle of Rivoli: French forces under General Napoleon Bonaparte defeat an Austrian army of 28,000 men, under ''Feldzeugmeister'' József Alvinczi, near Rivoli (modern-day Italy), ending Austria's fourth and final attempt to relieve the fortress city of Mantua. * January 26 – Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1745 Ferguson
Events January–March * January 7 – War of the Austrian Succession: The Austrian Army, under the command of Field Marshal Károly József Batthyány, makes a surprise attack at Amberg and the winter quarters of the Bavarian Army, and scatters the Bavarian defending troops, then captures the Bavarian capital at Munich * January 8 – The Quadruple Alliance treaty is signed at Warsaw by Great Britain, Austria, the Dutch Republic and the Duchy of Saxony. * January 20 – Less than two weeks after the disastrous Battle of Amberg leaves Bavaria undefended, the electorate's ruler (and Holy Roman Emperor) Karl VII Albrecht dies from gout at the age of 47, leaving the duchy without an adult to lead it. His 17-year-old son, Maximilian III Joseph, signs terms of surrender in April. * February 22 – The ruling white colonial government on the island of Jamaica foils a conspiracy by about 900 black slaves, who had been plotting to seize control and to massa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hamilton College (New York)
Hamilton College is a private liberal arts college in Clinton, Oneida County, New York. It was founded as Hamilton-Oneida Academy in 1793 and was chartered as Hamilton College in 1812 in honor of inaugural trustee Alexander Hamilton, following a proposal brought forward after his death in 1804. Hamilton has been coeducational since 1978, when it merged with its coordinate sister school Kirkland College. Hamilton is an exclusively undergraduate institution, enrolling 1,900 students in the fall of 2021. Students may choose from 57 areas of study, including 44 majors, or design an interdisciplinary concentration. Hamilton's student body is 53% female and 47% male, and comes from 45 U.S. states and 46 countries. Hamilton places among the most selective colleges in the country, with an 11.8% acceptance rate. Athletically, Hamilton teams compete in the New England Small College Athletic Conference. History Hamilton began in 1793 as the Hamilton-Oneida Academy, a seminary founded by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CHF Peters
Christian Heinrich Friedrich Peters (September 19, 1813 – July 18, 1890) was a German–American university teacher and astronomer at the Litchfield Observatory of Hamilton College, New York, and a pioneer in the study and visual discovery of asteroids. His name is often given as . Biography He was born in Koldenbüttel in Schleswig, then part of Denmark but later part of Germany, and later studied under Carl Friedrich Gauss. His younger brother was the German explorer Wilhelm Peters. Peters spoke many languages and gravitated to Italy at the time of the Italian unification. His association with radical groups brought him to the attention of authorities, and he fled to the Ottoman Empire, where he became a government advisor. At the suggestion of the resident U.S. consul, he emigrated to the United States in 1854. In 1874, Peters headed a United States Naval Observatory expedition to Queenstown, New Zealand, to observe the Transit of Venus. The visit is marked with a pla ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pluto
Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of trans-Neptunian object, bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume, by a small margin, but is slightly less massive than Eris (dwarf planet), Eris. Like other Kuiper belt objects, Pluto is made primarily of ice and rock and is much smaller than the inner planets. Compared to Moon, Earth's moon, Pluto has only one sixth its mass and one third its volume. Pluto has a moderately orbital eccentricity, eccentric and inclined orbit, ranging from from the Sun. Light from the Sun takes 5.5 hours to reach Pluto at its average distance (). Pluto's eccentric orbit periodically brings it closer to the Sun than Neptune, but a stable orbital resonance prevents them from colliding. Pluto has moons of Pluto, five known moons: Charon (moon), Charon, the larg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
9th Planet
Planet Nine is a List of hypothetical Solar System objects, hypothetical planet in the outer region of the Solar System. Its gravitational effects could explain the peculiar clustering of orbits for a group of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs), bodies beyond Neptune that orbit the Sun at distances averaging more than 250 times that of the Earth. These ETNOs tend to make their closest approaches to the Sun in one sector, and their orbits are similarly tilted. These alignments suggest that an undiscovered planet may be shepherding the orbits of the most distant known Solar System objects. Nonetheless, some astronomers question this conclusion and instead assert that the clustering of the ETNOs orbits is due to observational biases, resulting from the difficulty of discovering and tracking these objects during much of the year. Based on earlier considerations, this hypothetical super-Earth-sized planet would have had a predicted mass of five to ten times that of the Earth, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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