Alice Grace Cook (18 February 1877 - 27 May 1958), known as Grace Cook or A. Grace Cook was a British astronomer. Cook lived in
Stowmarket
Stowmarket ( ) is a market town in Suffolk, England,OS Explorer map 211: Bury St.Edmunds and Stowmarket
Scale: 1:25 000. Publisher:Ordnance Survey – Southampton A2 edition. Publishing Date:2008. on the busy A14 trunk road between Bury St Edm ...
,
Suffolk.
After she died she was remembered by her colleagues as a skilled and dedicated observer.
In September 2021 it was announced that a new school in the town was to be named after Grace Cook. The school will be run by the Orwell Multi Academy Trust. In March 2023 minor planet 2000 EY
156 was named Gracecook in her honour.
Career
Grace Cook attended a series of lectures in astronomy given by Joseph Hardcastle in the autumn of 1909. Enthused she joined the
British Astronomical Association
The British Astronomical Association (BAA) was formed in 1890 as a national body to support the UK's amateur astronomers.
Throughout its history, the BAA has encouraged observers to make scientifically valuable observations, often in collaborati ...
on 22 February 1911 at the invitation of Hardcastle. Cook observed the 7 November 1914
transit of Mercury
frameless, upright=0.5
A transit of Mercury across the Sun takes place when the planet Mercury passes directly between the Sun and a superior planet. During a transit, Mercury appears as a tiny black dot moving across the Sun as the planet obs ...
from her observatory. In January 1916 Cook was among the first group of women elected as Fellows of the
Royal Astronomical Society
(Whatever shines should be observed)
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. Her RAS election was proposed by
W F Denning. With Joseph Alfred Hardcastle, Cook worked to identify and describe 785
New General Catalogue objects on the 206 plates of the
John Franklin-Adams photographic survey. She was renowned for her work observing
meteors
A meteoroid () is a small rocky or metallic body in outer space.
Meteoroids are defined as objects significantly smaller than asteroids, ranging in size from grains to objects up to a meter wide. Objects smaller than this are classified as mi ...
, and also observed naked-eye phenomena including the
zodiacal light
The zodiacal light (also called false dawn when seen before sunrise) is a faint glow of diffuse sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust. Brighter around the Sun, it appears in a particularly dark night sky to extend from the Sun's direction ...
and
aurora
An aurora (plural: auroras or aurorae), also commonly known as the polar lights, is a natural light display in Earth's sky, predominantly seen in high-latitude regions (around the Arctic and Antarctic). Auroras display dynamic patterns of bri ...
e. During
World War One
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
Cook, with
Fiammetta Wilson, temporarily headed the British Astronomical Association's Meteor Section. Cook observed
comet
A comet is an icy, small Solar System body that, when passing close to the Sun, warms and begins to release gases, a process that is called outgassing. This produces a visible atmosphere or coma, and sometimes also a tail. These phenomena ...
s and Milky Way
novae and was among the first people to see
V603 Aquilae
V603 Aquilae (or Nova Aquilae 1918) was a bright nova first observed (from Earth) in the constellation Aquila in 1918. It was the brightest "new star" to appear in the sky since Kepler's Supernova in 1604. Like all novae, it is a binary ...
, a nova discovered in June 1918. This work earned her the
Edward C. Pickering Fellowship from the
Maria Mitchell Association
The Maria Mitchell Association is a private non-profit organization on the island of Nantucket off the coast of Massachusetts. The association owns the Maria Mitchell Observatory, a second observatory (the Loines Observatory), a Natural History ...
in 1920–1921. From 1921 to 1923 Cook was sole director of the British Astronomical Association's Meteor Section. On 30 May 1922 she attended the RAS Centenary celebrations held at
Burlington House where she appears in the group photograph identified as number 16.
Publications
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Further reading
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References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cook, Alice Grace
British women astronomers
20th-century British astronomers
1870s births
1958 deaths
Fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society
20th-century British women scientists