The Royal Observatory Greenwich was established 350 years ago this month. Before 1972, Astronomo Royal was also director of this structure. Credit: Paul Wilkinson (Flickr, CC of 2.0)
Near the western limb of the moon there is Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms – a vast band of land covering 1,600 miles (2,500 kilometers) from north to south and covers 10.5 percent of the lunar surface. His hinterland is full of a sea swarming of craters. One of them, at the south -eastern end, honors the first astronomer of Great Britain Royal, John Flamsteed.
Ancient and consumed, it is 13 miles (21 km), its protruding edge that falls 1.4 miles (2.2 km) on a floor sprinkled with rubble. Flamsteed is one of the numerous moon craters called for one of the 15 men who since 1675 were the main astronomers of Great Britain. Others are recognized with asteroids or craters of Mars and one – Edmond Halley – Predes his name to Halley’s comet.
For 350 years, Royal astronomers have recommended British monarchs on the stars and more: from navigation to the production of maps, timing to railway calibers, wind energy to geoengineering, robotics to climate change and even the existential survival of humanity.
Nine of these astronomical titans were knights for their services and today’s historical operator – Professor Sir Martin Rees, the Baron Rees of Ludlow – holds an equal for a lifetime in the Lord House of Great Britain. But when the first Royal astronomer arrived in London one morning in February in 1675, he could hardly have imagined what he expected.
The first real astronomer
Flamsteed came from the English county of derbyshire. His father managed a malt activity, immersing and drying for beer cereals. The boy had a serious knowledge of arithmetic and hamlets and solidly grabbed the scientific language of the day: Latin.
A love for astronomy flourished when Flamsteed observed a partial solar eclipse. Fascinated by the timing and southern, he wrote his first 19 -year -old scientific newspaper and became a deacon of the church. Flamsteed’s life could have settled in bucolic darkness but for a man, his rich patron and the general surveyor of England: Sir Jonas Moore.
Moore presented a petition to King Charles II to build a London Observatory – and arrived in the most unlikely circumstances. During the age of the sail, the sailors could not carefully measure longitude when they move from the earth. But the king’s lover, Louise de Kérouaille, felt a proposal to use the moon to determine longitude at sea.
Charles appointed a royal commission whose panel included the Sir architect Christopher Wren, the astronomer Robert Hooke and the politician Silius Titus. It was Tito who brought Flamsteed to London in February 1675. The young astronomer was awarded to test the proposal, but rapidly fired it as impossible.
However, the Commission convinced the king to finance an observatory and take an astronomer to map the stars and lunar movements and solve the problem of longitude. On March 4, Flamsteed was appointed “the astronomical observer of the king” with an annual salary of £ 100 (equal to about £ 17,200, or almost $ 23,000, today).
A real mandate commanded Flamsteed “immediately to apply himself with the most exact care and diligence for the reptifiette of the tables of the movements of the skies and places of the fixed stars, in order to discover the so desired longitude of the places to perfect the art of navigation”. Another June mandate created the Royal Greenwich Observatory, with Flamsteed who threw its foundation stone in August.
He has never been entitled “Astronomer Royal” in his life – only “our astronomical observer”, with similar terms used for flamesteed successors. But the name of the Astronomo Royal made his way in the popular parliament in the 18th century and included the direction of Greenwich until 1972.
A career of results
Flamsteed has won praise for high standards and meticulousness, but has become a bitter dispute with Sir Isaac Newton, president of the Royal Society. Newton was frustrated by Greenwich’s lack of publications under Flamsteed. He got Warrant for the Royal Society to examine the Observatory’s work.
Not willing to risk its reputation by publishing unsolicited data, an uncensized flamesed and has maintained its sealed registers. But Newton and Edmond Halley – former Flamsteed assistant – have obtained and published a catalog of pirated stars. Flamsteed collected 300 of the 400 prints in the catalog and burned them. “If Sir would have been sensitive,” he wrote, “I did both he and Dr. Halley a great kindness.”
After Flamsteed’s death in 1719, his work was published thanks to his widow: a vast opus of lunar tables, planetary movements and 2,935 cataloged stars. He gained the astronomer Royal and Greenwich Prauduts to be the exactness of their observations.
Nor should Margaret Flamsteed’s contribution be reduced to a minimum. Twenty -four years Junior of Flamsteed, the diaries of this highly literate and numbered woman reveal a shared love for astronomy. He observed with his husband – “Solus cum sponsa“(” Halon with his wife “), wrote Flamsteed – and wrote his letters when the hands of the old man became shaky. After his death, and great expense for herself, in 1725 and in 1729 he published Flamsteed British Coelestis Historia AND Atlas Coelestisrespectively, the largest, most accurate and complete stellar atlants of their time. Through Margaret’s efforts, the role of the royal astronomer and the institution of Greenwich herself were high in the front line in astronomical research in the 18th century.
Flamsteed also made one of the first recorded sightings of Uranus in 1690, a century before the planet was found. He exchanged it for a star, cataloging like 34 tauri.
Centuries of successes …
The first six Royal astronomers – Flamsteed, Edmond Halley, James Bradley, Nathaniel Bliss, Nevil Maskelyne and John Pond – they dedicated themselves to longitude and navigation. This is not surprising that Greenwich was administered by the Board of Ordnance and subsequently by the British admiralty.
In 1731, Halley showed that longitude was actually measurable using moon movements. His method claimed to be accurate within 69 miles (111 km) near the equator and marked one of the most exact calculations before the introduction of marine chronomters. And in 1767, Maskelyne founded the Nautical Almanac For a comfortable determination all the year of longitude for maritime.
During his mandate, Bradley measured the speed of light while it takes 8 minutes 12 seconds to travel between the earth and the sun – only 1.3 percent too high. He also mapped more than 60,000 stars so precisely that his rankings remained in use in the 20th century.
Using the observations of Maskelyne, Charles Hutton has been able to calculate the density of the earth as 4.5 times that of the water, slightly lower than the value of today of 5.515. And in 1781, when William Herschel discovered Uranus, the couple shared their joy in finding a new planet. “I don’t know how to call him,” Maskelyne wrote. “It is likely that it is a normal planet that moves in an almost circular orbit around the sun like a comet.”
Greenwich has long been synonymous with timing. In 1833, Pond installing a red time ball that rises a tree, then falls exactly at 13:00, providing a public signal for sailors and others near the Observatory to synchronize watches with the average time of Greenwich. And in 1924, the astronomer Royal Frank Watson Dyson introduced the six pips: a series of short acoustic signals used by the BBC radio stations to mark the change of every hour.
The astronomer Royal George Biddell Airy set up the first Meridian in Greenwich, where the international meridian remained from 1884 to 1984. (Since 1984, the international meridian has been about 336 feet [102.5 meters] As the east of the historical meridian.) Sevel by a brass strip (and steel) in the courtyard of the Observatory, since 1999 the original main meridian has been projected through the skies of London by a powerful green laser.
… and some mistakes
But real astronomers also got into hot water. In 1846, Airy did not act when the astronomer John Couch Adams approached him with the data that provided for the position of an eighth planet. Weeks later, two German astronomers discovered Neptune, snatching glory from the grip of Great Britain and exposing airy to a media mauling. However, more recent reinterpretations suggest that the inaccurate nature of Adams’ calculations gave a hariosa break before committing to a research that, for Great Britain, would have proved too late. It has been hypothesized that Airy “has sacrificed himself on the altar of British astronomy”, while writing William B. Ashworth Jr. of the Library of the Linda Hall, ensuring the role of Adams and British in the discovery of Neptune, but at the expense of losing a certain credibility himself.
It was not just the Airy brush with misfortune. The railway engineers consulted it for wind speeds and pressure before building a bridge on the Tay River of Scotland. But in 1879, while a train passed it in a storm of wild wind, the bridge collapsed, killing dozens of passengers. Airy was severely criticized for her advice.
On the eve of the space era, the astronomer Royal Harold Spencer Jones insisted on the fact that “generations pass before the man land on the moon” with “little hope that he managed to return to Earth and tell us his experiences”. And his successor, Richard Woolley, called Space Travel “Utter Bilge … It’s all quite rotten”.
More to come
For 350 years, Royal astronomers have transformed from longitude seekers to the reference boys of Great Britain for science, education and technology. In the words of the current historian, Professor Sir Martin Rees, the power of astronomy to transcend national and cultural boundaries very much reveals on the cosmos and ourselves.
“Most of the educated people are aware of the fact that we are the result of billions of years of evolution, but they tend to feel that we are somehow the end,” said Rees New Statesman. “We are less than half of the life of the sun-on it is so long that it took us for us to emerge from the primordial melma. Astronomy gives a feeling on the long-haul future.”
