Gregg D. Thompson of

Brisbane Brisbane ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the states and territories of Australia, Australian state of Queensland, and the list of cities in Australia by population, third-most populous city in Australia and Oceania, with a populati ...

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

is an

amateur astronomer Amateur astronomy is a hobby where participants enjoy observing or imaging celestial objects in the sky using the unaided eye, binoculars, or telescopes. Even though scientific research may not be their primary goal, some amateur astronomers m ...

Astronomy

Gregg Thompson was one of the founding members of the Southern Astronomical Society (SAS). Before 1981 he started making a set of charts of bright galaxies, designed to help

deep sky A deep-sky object (DSO) is any astronomical object that is not an individual star or Solar System object (such as Sun, Moon, planet, comet, etc.). The classification is used for the most part by amateur astronomers to denote visually observed fa ...

observers in their search for extragalactic

supernova A supernova is a powerful and luminous explosion of a star. It has the plural form supernovae or supernovas, and is abbreviated SN or SNe. This transient astronomical event occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star or when ...

e. In 1985 he received the Amateur Achievement Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, together with Robert Owen Evans, who had made several supernova discoveries using Thompson's charts. Evans wrote that the number of galaxies he was able to observe grew substantially after the charts were produced. Gregg Thompson also helped verify some of Evans' discoveries.

Public outreach

In 1990 Gregg Thompson co-authored with James T. Bryan, Jr. the

astronomical Astronomy () is a natural science that studies celestial objects and phenomena. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and evolution. Objects of interest include planets, moons, stars, nebulae, galaxies ...

atlas An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of maps of Earth or of a region of Earth. Atlases have traditionally been bound into book form, but today many atlases are in multimedia formats. In addition to presenting geographic ...

''The Supernova Search Charts and Handbook'', containing 248 comparison charts of 345 of the brightest

galaxies A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, dark matter, bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. ...

, highly valued especially by supernova hunters and recommended by the Supernova Search Committee of the

American Association of Variable Star Observers The American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) is an international nonprofit organization, founded in 1911, focused on coordinating, analyzing, publishing, and archiving variable star observations made largely by amateur astronomers. ...

. In 1993 he published ''The Australian Guide to Stargazing'', a manual for both

naked-eye Naked eye, also called bare eye or unaided eye, is the practice of engaging in visual perception unaided by a magnifying, light-collecting optical instrument, such as a telescope or microscope, or eye protection. Vision corrected to normal ...

and

telescope A telescope is a device used to observe distant objects by their emission, absorption, or reflection of electromagnetic radiation. Originally meaning only an optical instrument using lenses, curved mirrors, or a combination of both to observe ...

observing of the sky of the southern hemisphere with explanatory diagrams, photographs and detailed drawings, describing the basics of the

night sky The night sky is the nighttime appearance of celestial objects like stars, planets, and the Moon, which are visible in a clear sky between sunset and sunrise, when the Sun is below the horizon. Natural light sources in a night sky include ...

observation to novice amateur astronomers.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Thompson, Gregg Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 20th-century Australian astronomers Amateur astronomers 21st-century Australian astronomers