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Sir James South
Sir James South FRS FRSE PRAS FLS LLD (October 1785 – 19 October 1867) was a British astronomer. He was a joint founder of the Astronomical Society of London, and it was under his name, as President of the Society in 1831, that a petition was successfully submitted to obtain a Royal Charter, whereupon it became the Royal Astronomical Society. Life He was born in Southwark in London in October 1785, the son of James South, a pharmaceutical chemist. John Flint South was his younger half-brother. He originally trained as a chemist, then as a surgeon, but his interests in astronomy overtook all things. In 1821 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and in 1822 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh his proposer being Edward Troughton. He won the Copley Medal in 1826 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in that same year. He was knighted by King William IV in 1831. Starting around 1826, James South made plans for a new, larger telescop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fellow Of The Royal Society
Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science, and medical science". Fellow, Fellowship of the Society, the oldest known scientific academy in continuous existence, is a significant honour. It has been awarded to many eminent scientists throughout history, including Isaac Newton (1672), Michael Faraday (1824), Charles Darwin (1839), Ernest Rutherford (1903), Srinivasa Ramanujan (1918), Albert Einstein (1921), Paul Dirac (1930), Winston Churchill (1941), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1944), Dorothy Hodgkin (1947), Alan Turing (1951), Lise Meitner (1955) and Francis Crick (1959). More recently, fellowship has been awarded to Stephen Hawking (1974), David Attenborough (1983), Tim Hunt (1991), Elizabeth Blackburn (1992), Tim Berners-Lee (2001), Venki R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Royal Society Of Edinburgh
The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was established in 1783. , there are around 1,800 Fellows. The Society covers a broader selection of fields than the Royal Society of London, including literature and history. Fellowship includes people from a wide range of disciplines – science & technology, arts, humanities, medicine, social science, business, and public service. History At the start of the 18th century, Edinburgh's intellectual climate fostered many clubs and societies (see Scottish Enlightenment). Though there were several that treated the arts, sciences and medicine, the most prestigious was the Society for the Improvement of Medical Knowledge, commonly referred to as the Medical Society of Edinburgh, co-founded by the mathematician Colin Maclaurin in 1731. Maclaurin was unhappy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Highgate Cemetery
Highgate Cemetery is a place of burial in north London, England. There are approximately 170,000 people buried in around 53,000 graves across the West and East Cemeteries. Highgate Cemetery is notable both for some of the people buried there as well as for its ''de facto'' status as a nature reserve. The Cemetery is designated Grade I on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. It is one of the Magnificent Seven cemeteries in London. Location The cemetery is in Highgate N6, next to Waterlow Park, in the London Borough of Camden. It comprises two sites, on either side of Swains Lane. The main gate is on Swains Lane just north of Oakshott Avenue. There is another, disused, gate on Chester Road. The nearest public transport ( Transport for London) is the C11 bus, Brookfield Park stop, and Archway tube station. History and setting The cemetery in its original formthe northwestern wooded areaopened in 1839, as part of a plan to provide seven large, modern cemeteries, now known a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stephen Groombridge
Stephen Groombridge FRS (7 January 1755 – 30 March 1832) was a British merchant and astronomer. Life He was born at Goudhurst in Kent on 7 January 1755. He succeeded when about 21 to the business in West Smithfield of a linen draper named Greenland, to whom he had been apprenticed. Later, and until 1816, he was a successful West India merchant. He lived mainly at Goudhurst, where he built a small observatory; but moved to Blackheath in 1802. In 1806, using a then new transit circle built by Edward Troughton, he began compiling a star catalogue of stars down to about eighth or ninth magnitude. He spent ten years making observations on the Groombridge Transit Circle and another ten years doing reductions of the data (correcting for refraction, instrument error and clock error). In 1827 he suffered a "severe attack of paralysis" from which he never fully recovered. Others continued the work, continuing with corrections for aberration and nutation among others. Groombridge ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Groombridge Transit Circle
Groombridge Transit Circle was a meridian transit circle made by Edward Troughton for the English astronomer Stephen Groombridge in 1806, which Groombridge used to compile data for the star catalogue, ''Catalogue of Circumpolar Stars''. The advantage of a transit circle over a mural circle (which can measure polar distances) is that it allows measuring right ascension and declination at the same time. It had an aperture of 3.5 inches and a 5-foot focal length, mounted inside two 4 foot circles on stone piers. Groombridge used the instrument to determine the positions of over 4000 circumpolar stars. It was eventually bought by James South, and it remained at his observatory at Kensington until 1870. See also *Groombridge 1830 Groombridge 1830 (also known as 1830 Groombridge or Argelander's Star)Peters, C. A. F.; "On the Parallax of Argelander's Star", Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, December 1853, v.50, p.302, is a star in the constellatio ... Refe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Great Refractor
Great refractor refers to a large telescope with a lens, usually the largest refractor at an observatory with an equatorial mount. The preeminence and success of this style in observational astronomy defines an era in modern telescopy in the 19th and early 20th century. Great refractors were large refracting telescopes using achromatic lenses (as opposed to the mirrors of reflecting telescope A reflecting telescope (also called a reflector) is a telescope that uses a single or a combination of curved mirrors that reflect light and form an image. The reflecting telescope was invented in the 17th century by Isaac Newton as an alternati ...s). They were often the largest in the world, or largest in a region. Despite typical designs having smaller apertures than reflectors, great refractors offered a number of advantages and were popular for astronomy. It was also popular to exhibit large refractors at international exhibits, and examples of this include the Trophy Telescope at t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dunsink Observatory
The Dunsink Observatory is an astronomical observatory established in 1785 in the townland of Dunsink in the outskirts of the city of Dublin, Ireland.Alexander Thom''Irish Almanac and Official Directory''7th ed., 1850 p. 258. Retrieved: 2011-02-22. Dunsink's most famous director was William Rowan Hamilton, who, amongst other things, discovered quaternions, the first non-commutative algebra form, while walking from the observatory to the city with his wife. The annual Hamilton Walk that commemorates this discovery begins at the observatory. He is also renowned for his Hamiltonian formulation of dynamics. History The observatory was established by an endowment of £3,000 in the will of Francis Andrews, who was Provost of Trinity College Dublin at his death on 18 June 1774. The site was established on the south slope of a low hill in the townland of Dunsink, 84m above sea level. The South Telescope, a 12-inch Grubb instrument, is a refracting (i.e. it uses lens) telescope built ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Grubb
Thomas Grubb (4 August 1800 – 19 September 1878) was an Irish optician and founder of the Grubb Telescope Company. He was born near Portlaw, County Waterford, Ireland, the son of William Grubb Junior, a prosperous Quaker farmer and his second wife, Eleanor Fayle. Thomas started out in 1830 in Dublin as a metal billiard-table manufacturer. He diversified into making telescopes and erected a public observatory near his factory at 1 Upper Charlemont Street, Portobello, Dublin. As makers of some of the largest and best-known telescopes of the Victorian era, the company was at the forefront of optical and mechanical engineering. His innovations for large telescopes included clock-driven polar mounts, whiffletree mirror mounting cells and Cassegrain reflector optics. Grubb helped build the famous telescope for William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, at Parsonstown (now known as Birr), County Offaly, Ireland. One of his earliest instruments - the telescope for Markree Observatory ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Markree Observatory
Markree Observatory was an astronomical observatory in County Sligo, Ireland. The asteroid 9 Metis was discovered from this observatory in 1848 by Cooper's assistant Andrew Graham using a comet seeker telescope. (Signed 29 April 1848; the discovery was first announced on 27 April) The observatory was also home to the largest refractor of the early 1830s, which had a aperture Cauchoix of Paris lens; the largest in the world at that time. The observatory also housed a number of instruments and was operated to varying degrees throughout the 19th century. The observatory is noted for its discovery of the asteroid 9 Metis in 1848 as well as a 60,000 item star catalogue of the 1850s. In the later 1800s it was operated again after a brief hiatus, and gained note for its meteorological observations and research on double stars. History In 1830, Colonel Edward Joshua Cooper MP (1798–1863) eldest son of Edward Synge Cooper MP, and Ann, daughter of Henry Vansittart, Governor of Bengal, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert-Aglaé Cauchoix
Robert-Aglaé Cauchoix (24 April 1776 – 5 February 1845) was a French optician and instrument maker, whose lenses played a part in the race of the great refractor telescopes in the first half of the 19th century. Instruments At first Cauchoix produced a wide range of scientific instruments including barometers and micrometers, but he soon specialized in optics, making spherometers and objectives. He made a telescope for the Paris Observatory in 1820 and in 1825 he made a 6.5 inch (16.5 cm) refractor for the observatory of the Collegio Romano, a Jesuit academy in Rome. In the Royal Observatory, Greenwich an 1838 instrument named the Sheepshanks telescope includes an objective by Cauchoix. The Sheepshanks had a 6.7 inch (17 cm) wide lens, and was the biggest telescope at Greenwich for about twenty years. An 1840 report from the Observatory noted of the then-new Sheepshanks telescope with the Cauchoix doublet: Great refractors Although the reflector telescope was inve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Refracting Telescope
A refracting telescope (also called a refractor) is a type of optical telescope that uses a lens (optics), lens as its objective (optics), objective to form an image (also referred to a dioptrics, dioptric telescope). The refracting telescope design was originally used in spyglasses and astronomy, astronomical telescopes but is also used for long-focus lens, long-focus camera lenses. Although large refracting telescopes were very popular in the second half of the 19th century, for most research purposes, the refracting telescope has been superseded by the reflecting telescope, which allows larger apertures. A refractor's magnification is calculated by dividing the focal length of the objective lens by that of the eyepiece. Refracting telescopes typically have a lens at the front, then a optical train, long tube, then an eyepiece or instrumentation at the rear, where the telescope view comes to focus. Originally, telescopes had an objective of one element, but a century later, tw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William IV Of Great Britain
William IV (William Henry; 21 August 1765 – 20 June 1837) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and King of Hanover from 26 June 1830 until his death in 1837. The third son of George III, William succeeded his elder brother George IV, becoming the last king and penultimate monarch of Britain's House of Hanover. William served in the Royal Navy in his youth, spending time in North America and the Caribbean, and was later nicknamed the "Sailor King". In 1789, he was created Duke of Clarence and St Andrews. In 1827, he was appointed Britain's first Lord High Admiral of the United Kingdom, Lord High Admiral since 1709. As his two elder brothers died without leaving legitimate issue, he Hereditary monarchy, inherited the throne when he was 64 years old. His reign saw several reforms: the English Poor Laws, Poor Law was updated, child labour restricted, Slavery Abolition Act 1833, slavery abolished in nearly all of the British Empire, and the e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
