The Royal Observatory Greenwich
A Glance at its History and Work
Published on 22. August 2013
Book
Paperback/Softback
326 pages
978-1-108-06506-1 (ISBN)
Description
When this highly illustrated work first appeared in 1900, the day-to-day business of an astronomer was prone to misapprehension; the reality tended to be clouded by the temptation to imagine observatories as preoccupied with making awe-inspiring discoveries and glimpsing distant worlds. Describing himself as a hybrid between an engineer and an accountant, astronomer Edward Walter Maunder (1851-1928) explodes the romantic myths and takes the reader on an entertaining tour of the history and real purposes of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Founded with the sole aim of advancing navigation at sea, the observatory originally confined its activities to the accurate compilation of celestial charts. In exploring the observatory's various departments and the lives of its Astronomers Royal, Maunder shows how its remit slowly expanded into heliography, meteorology, spectroscopy and the study of magnetism, which transformed it from a tool of the Navy to a major institution in contemporary astronomy.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
48 Halftones, unspecified; 6 Line drawings, unspecified
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
461 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-108-06506-1 (9781108065061)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Edward Walter Maunder was an English astronomer who lived from 12 April 1851 to 21 March 1928. His research into sunspots and the solar magnetic cycle led to the discovery of the Maunder Minimum, which lasted from 1645 to 1715. Maunder was born in London in 1851, the youngest child of a Wesleyan Society minister. He studied at King's College London but did not graduate. To fund his studies, he obtained a job in a London bank. Maunder returned to the Royal Observatory in 1873 as a spectroscopic assistant. He married Edith Hannah Bustin in 1875, and they had six children: four sons (one died in infancy) and two girls. Following Edith's death in 1888, he met Annie Scott Dill Russell (later Annie Russell Maunder, 1868-1947), a mathematician and astronomer trained at Cambridge's Girton College, with whom he cooperated for the rest of his life, in 1890. From 1890 through 1895, she worked as a "lady computer" at the Observatory. Maunder and Russell married in 1895. Annie Maunder became one of the Royal Astronomical Society's first female members in 1916.
Content
1. Introduction; 2. Flamsteed; 3. Halley and his successors; 4. Airy; 5. The observatory buildings; 6. The time department; 7. The transit and circle departments; 8. The altazimuth department; 9. The magnetic and meteorological departments; 10. The heliographic department; 11. The spectroscopic department; 12. The astrographic department; 13. The double-star department; Index.