Tag: astronomer

December 31 – Death of John Flamsteed (1719)

I normally only do birthdays, not deathdays, but here is a brief post to mark the passing, on December 31st, 1719, of Denby’s most famous son, John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, and the man who nearly discovered Uranus (he thought it was a star).

Flamsteed is remembered mostly as a star cataloger, and his posthumously-published Historia Coelestis Britannica contained nearly 3,000.

John Flamsteed
John Flamsteed

These days he is commemorated by the obligatory asteroid (4987), a crater on the Moon in the Oceanus Procellarum, and a school and memorial garden in his home village in Derbyshire, England.

Also in the news today, asteroid 583 Klotilde was discovered by Johann Palisa on December 31, 1905 (he must have had a similar view to me regarding going out on New Years Eve). It was named after the daughter of the Austrian astronomer H E Weiss, director of the observatory from where the discovery was made.

George W Ritchey is today’s second birthday boy. The American astronomer and telescope maker (co-inventor of the Ritchey-Chretien reflector) was born today in 1864.

AND FINALLY, GOING ON DOWN HERE. . . .

It’s my birthday!

June 21 – birth of Max Wolf

1863 – Where would I be without this guy? German astronomer and astrophotographer Max Wolf was born today in 1863, and as any regular visitor to this site will know, he was a phenomenal discoverer of asteroids, with an enormous 248 finds, from 323 Brucia on December 22nd 1891 (named after an American patron of astronomy), to 5926 Schönfeld (a German astronomer) on August 4th 1929.

Keen eyed astronomer, Max Wolf.

Keen-eyed astronomer, Max Wolf.

Wolf was not just an asteroid hunter though. He was also a noted spotter of comets, including 43P/Wolf-Harrington, which will is at perihelion soon (Aug 4th, 2025). He was also the first person to see Halley’s Comet in 1910.

Fans of Star Trek will, of course, be familiar with one of his discoveries, the red dwarf Wolf 359, which will be the site of a famous battle with the Borg in 2367!

December 16 – Discovery of Asteroid 351 Yrsa (1892)

Asteroid 351 Yrsa was discovered today in 1892 by Max Wolf.  There isn’t a great deal to say about it:  it’s in the main belt, and is about 40 km across.  It is thought to have been named after the wife of King Eadgils of Swedish legend.  her father, Helghe, who had only had a brief fling with her mother, visited the region where she lived years later and, not knowing she was his daughter, got her in the family way, as they say.   Unlike the average Greek or Roman god, who would have thought nothing of it, he did the decent thing and killed himself upon discovering the truth.

Lithograph depicting Yrsa
Lithograph depicting Yrsa

Max Wolf was a great friend of today’s birthday boy, Edward Emerson (E.E.) Barnard, namesake of Barnard’s Star, one of the most closely observed objects in the Galaxy.  Barnard was mainly a prolific comet finder, discovering 17 in all (15 solo, and 2 co-discoveries), but he’s always going to be associated with the one star in my mind, because it was, and indeed may still be for all I know, the intended target of Project Daedelus, the mind-bogglingly ambitious unmanned interstellar mission proposed by the British Interplanetary Society.  When I was an impressionable teenager in the 1970’s, Daedelus seemed likely to happen “any year now”.  Unfortunately, 30 years later, they still haven’t quite got around to working out how to get the necessary helium-3 fuel back from Jupiter in order to get it to work, and I suspect that the cost in today’s money of a nuclear-powered spaceship bigger than a Saturn 5 and built in orbit would be rather more expensive than gold-plating the Isle of Wight or the UK buying Australia back.

E E Barnard
E E Barnard

 

 

December 09 – Death of Patrick Moore (2012)

There’s not a lot I can say that hasn’t already been said a hundred times or more about this chap, but it’s nine years today since the passing, at the age of 89, of Sir Patrick Alfred Caldwell-Moore CBE, FRS, FRAS, singleton, leg spinner, xylophonist (if that’s the right word), RAF veteran, composer, cat lover, EEC hater, star of The Goodies, The Morecambe and Wise Show and GamesMaster, general legend, and best all-round entertainer since Daffy Duck. And it appears from the photograph that he also may have owned a telescope.

Patrick Moore (image credit: unknown).
Patrick Moore (image credit: unknown).

I’m not sure where I got that signed photograph from, but it lives inside my copy of Mrs Moore in Space, by Patrick’s mother, Gertrude.

I briefly met him a few times, donkey’s years ago: two of these were at speeches he was giving in the environs of North Staffordshire and South Cheshire, where I was restricted to standing in line waiting for an autograph, and twice were a little more informal at book signings I was involved with in my previous life as a bookseller. I’d like to say how many books Patrick Moore wrote, but I’m not entirely sure they can be easily counted, as they stretch over such a long period, and had such wildly varied life spans.

1892 ⇒ Discovery of the large main belt asteroid 349 Dembowska by French astronomer Auguste Charlois. It was named in honour of the Italian astronomer Baron Ercole Dembowski, a specialist in double stars (and if the name sounds less than Italian, it’s because his father was a Polish general). 349 Dembowska is about 140 km wide, and is one of the brightest of the large asteroids. It is classified as R-type, characterised by spectral lines showing the presence of olivine and pyroxene (the main constituents of the Earth’s mantle), and possibly plagioclase feldspars.

December 06 – Launch of Pioneer 3

Launched from Cape Canaveral on December 6th 1958, Pioneer 3 was supposed to be a lunar flyby. Unfortunately that didn’t happen, owing to a problem with its booster rocket, but the craft did manage to reach a distance from Earth of about 63,000 miles, and used its Geiger-Müller tubes to gather useful information about the Van Allen radiation belt.

Pioneer 3 (image: NASA / JPL)
Pioneer 3 (image: NASA / JPL)

Pioneer 3 ended its one day flight by burning up over Africa.

It isn’t easy to get a sense of scale on some of these artist’s impressions, such as the one above, with Pioneer 3 optimistically shown flying over the lunar surface, so here’s a NASA photo of the probe being prepared:

1888 – Birth of comedian and astronomer Will Hay in Stockton-on-Tees, North East England. In 1933 he discovered a Great White Spot on Saturn in August 1933 (note: it’s “a” not “the” Great White Spot, as there have been several observed over the past century). At his home in Norbury, South London, Hay built his own observatory to house his 1895-vintage 12.5 inch Newtonian reflector and the 6-inch refractor he used to discover the white spot.

1893 – Discovery of asteroid 378 Holmia by Auguste Charlois (the name is the Latin for Stockholm).

1998 – Launch of the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS). One of NASA’s SMEX (Small Explorer) missions, SWAS was intended to have an operational life of two years, but managed to stretch to six, studying the cores of interstellar clouds to help our understanding of what they are composed of, and how they cool and collapse to form stars.

Finally, we can’t let the day go by without saying happy birthday to the late, great Johann Palisa, born in 1868 in Troppau (now in the Czech Republic). Over the course of about 50 years he discovered 122 asteroids, and is mentioned a helluva lot in this blog. Palisa persisted in making all his asteroid discoveries visually, even though Max Wolf was able to streak past his total with ease by using photography.

An Apollo photo of the lunar crater “Palisa” (image: NASA).

October 23 – Birth of Gustav Spörer

German astronomer and sunspot spotter Gustav Spörer was born in Berlin on this day in 1822.

He is remembered mainly in the name of a period of low sunspot activity, the Spörer minimum, identified by American astronomer John A. Eddy.

Solar activity is measured in cycles, each cycle being roughly 11 years long, including a flipping of the Sun’s magnetic field at around the time of maximum sunspot activity, and involving a flow between high (maxima) and low (minima) sunspot numbers. On a longer time scale, it can be seen that maxima and minima gradually get bigger for a while, and then start getting smaller again, leading to the spiky curve shown below.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

The Spörer minimum occured between 1460 and 1550, and is just one of a series of low points in sunspot activity identified over the centuries. Sunspots wax and wane in frequency, and it only seems to us that they are a frequent occurence because we are living through something called the Modern Maximum, a period of generally higher than average sunspot activity that began in 1914.

October 09 – Birth of Karl Schwarzschild (1873)

On October 9th 1873 German physicist Karl Schwartzschild was born in Frankfurt. He was the man who came up with the formula for the event horizon known as the Schwartzschild Radius, which defines the size of a black hole. Very simply, in language even I can understand, it’s the size an object of a certain mass has to be so that nothing (not even light) can’t escape from its gravitational pull. So anything smaller than its own Schwartzschild radius can’t be seen. As an example, if the entire mass of the Earth were to be compressed into a sphere with a radius of nine millimetres, it would become a black hole. The Sun, however, would only need to be compressed to about 2 miles. So in this particular case, size would appear to be important.

April 25 – Birth of Astronomer Gérard de Vaucouleurs (1918)

Born today in 1918, Gérard de Vaucouleurs was a French astronomer who specialized in galaxies.   He is best known these days for his modification of Edwin Hubble‘s galaxy classification scheme.  De Vaucouleurs added bars, rings and spiral arms to Hubble’s basic system of elliptical, spiral and lenticular galaxies.

Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1300 (image credit: NASA/ESA).
Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1300 (image credit: STScI/NASA/ESA).

In honour of Monsieur de Vaucouleurs, Today’s photo (a composite image by the Hubble Space Telescope) shows the most barred, armed, spiral galaxy I could find.  NGC 1300 is in the constellation Eridanus. It was discovered by John Herschel in 1835, and is a member of the Eridanus Cluster of about 200 galaxies.

 1848  –  The large main belt asteroid 9 Metis was discovered by Irish astronomer Andrew Graham.  It was to be the last Irish asteroid for 106 years.

1890  –  Asteroid 291 Alice, of the Flora family, discovered by Johann Palisa. Alice is roughly the shape of a giant jelly bean, at about 19 x 12 x 11 km.

1890  –  Asteroid 292 Ludovica was also discovered today, and was also one of Johann Palisa’s. Palisa was obviously smoking on April 25th, whereas Auguste Charlois was probably steaming some time afterwards, as he too discovered both asteroids, but on the 26th.

1906  –  Asteroid 599 Luisa was discovered from Taunton, Mass., by prolific American asteroid and comet hunter Joel Hastings Metcalf. The origin of the name isn’t known, but I would like to point out that Metcalf’s father was called Lewis.

1993  –  Launch of X-ray telescope Alexis (Array of Low Energy X-Ray Imaging Sensors).

April 20 – Discovery of Asteroid 532 Herculina (1904)

Asteroid 532 Herculina was discovered this very day in 1904 by Max Wolf, born 21/06/1867 in Heidelberg, studied at Heidelberg, Chair of Astronomy at Heidelberg, died 03/10/1932… Can you guess where?

Wolf discovered a phenomenal 248 asteroids, presumably in the time he saved by not bothering to leave Heidelberg. Herculina was his 9th of 1904, a year in which he was finding the critters at about one every three weeks.

Heidelberg Resident, Max Wolf.
Heidelberg Resident, Max Wolf.

With a diameter of 225 km, Herculina is one of the larger main belt asteroids, probably in the top 20. It has a nicely elliptical orbit which takes it from 2.3 to 3.26 AU from the Sun.

For a while Herculina was suspected to have a “moon”, following observations made in the 1970′s, but further studies have failed to find it. And that’s also pretty much the story of my attempt to find the location from whence was plucked the name. Herculina doesn’t appear to be anyone or anywhere in particular. Wolf’s previous asteroid, 531 Zerlina, is a character from Don Giovanni, and his next one, 539 Pamina, is from The Magic Flute. But Herculina is a mystery.

1903 – Discovery of asteroid 508 Princetonia.

April 16 – Robert Luther: Asteroid Hunter

Today is the birthday of Karl Theodor Robert Luther, born in 1822 in the town of Schweidnitz, which is now in Poland, but at the time was in Germany (where it remained until the end of WWII).

Luther discovered 24 asteroids between April 1852 and February 1890.  He died on February 15, 1900.  Like several other asteroid hunters, he is now honoured with a lunar crater and his own asteroid, 1303 Luthera (discovered March 16, 1928 by A. Schwassmann).

One of his asteroids, 90 Antiope, is very interesting (as asteroids go) because it consists of two almost identically sized bodies.  There’ll be more about that on October 1st.  I have been completely unable to find any picture or photograph of Luther, which is annoying.

1756  –  Death of Jacques Cassini.

1972  –  Launch of Apollo 16.