William Pearson (astronomer)

William Pearson (23 April 1767–6 September 1847) was an English schoolmaster, astronomer, and a founder of the Astronomical Society of London. He authored "Practical Astronomy" (2 vols., 1825 and 1829).
Biography.
William Pearson was born at Whitbeck in Cumberland on 23 April 1767. After graduating from Hawkshead Grammar School near Windermere, Cumberland, Pearson began his career as a schoolmaster at Hawkshead. After which, moving to Lincoln as undermaster of the Free Grammar School. Through Pearson's interest in astronomy, Pearson constructed an astronomical clock and an orrery, which was probably used for public lectures. Although enrolled at Cambridge University, he does not appear to have earned a degree. He was admitted as a sizar at Clare College in 1793, but may not have gained residence.
An original proprietor of the Royal Institution, Pearson finished a planetarium in 1803 that illustrated Dr. Thomas Young's lectures. On 10 January 1810 Pearson was presented to the rectory of Perivale in Middlesex. On 15 March 1817, Lord-chancellor Eldon presented Pearson to the rectory of South Kilworth in Leicestershire.
He acquired the Temple Grove School, a large private institution at East Sheen in 1810. After establishing an observatory there, he measured the diameters of the sun and moon during the partial solar eclipse of 7 September 1820, with one of John Dollond's divided object-glass micrometers.
The foundation of the Astronomical Society of London (now known as the Royal Astronomical Society) was largely due to his efforts. In 1812 and 1816, he began development of the society that formally took shape during a meeting at the Freemasons' Tavern on 12 January 1820. Pearson helped write the rules and served as treasurer during the society's first ten years. In 1819, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and received an honorary LL.D.
After leaving East Sheen in 1821, William erected an observatory at South Kilworth that possessed a 36-inch focal-length altazimuth telescope, originally constructed by Edward Troughton for the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. The observatory was also equipped with a 42-inch focal-length achromatic refractor by Tulley, a transit circle by William Simms, and a clock by Hardy.
While at South Kilworth, Pearson observed the occultations of the Pleiades in July and October 1821. In 1824 and 1829, he published the two quarto volumes of his "Introduction to Practical Astronomy." The first volume mainly contained tables for the processes of reduction. The second volume included elaborate descriptions and engravings of various astronomical instruments (drawn by John Farey, Jr, and engraved by Edmund Turrell) along with instructions for their use. Pearson received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (then known as the Astronomical Society of London) on 13 February 1829 for the publication, which Sir John Herschel called ‘one of the most important and extensive works on that subject which has ever issued from the press’.
In 1830, the Royal Observatory nominated Pearson to its new board of visitors. Assisted by a village mathematician named Ambrose Clarke, Pearson began the reobservation and computation of the 520 stars tabulated for occultations in his "Practical Astronomy" during the same year. He presented the resulting catalogue to the Royal Astronomical Society on 11 June 1841.
Pearson observed Halley's comet on 29 October 1835, and in 1839 he deduced a value for the obliquity of the ecliptic from his own research.
He died on 6 September 1847 at South Kilworth, and a tablet honoring his memory in the church recognizes the respect earned by his exemplary conduct as a clergyman and magistrate.
Family.
William Pearson married Frances Low on 22 February 1796 at St Swithun, East Retford, Nottinghamshire. Their daughter, Frances, was born in 1797 in Lincoln. Frances Pearson, née Low, died on 10 October 1831, aged 61 years and was buried at South Kilworth.
He married Eliza Sarah Hunter on 10 November 1832 at St George, Hanover Square, Middlesex. Eliza Sarah Pearson, née Hunter, died in Tunbridge Wells, Kent in 1878, aged 82.
Green Plaque.
On 16 January, 2020, a green plaque was unveiled at the Rectory, South Kilworth, Leicestershire. William Pearson lived there from 1821 until his death in 1847.
It was 200 years and four days after the dinner on 12 January, 1820 at the Freemason's Tavern, Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, which led to the formation of the Astronomical Society of London. In 1831 this became the Royal Astronomical Society.
William Pearson's grave was restored in 2019 to coincide with this event, with funding from South Kilworth Parish Council and the Royal Astronomical Society.


Margaret Flamsteed

Margaret Flamsteed (née Cooke) (c. 1670-1730) is the first woman on record to be associated with astronomy in Britain. She was married to John Flamsteed, the Astronomical Observer (a post that later became known as Astronomer Royal). After John Flamsteed's death she oversaw publication of both of his most famous works: Historia Coelestis Britannica in 1725 and Atlas Coelestis in 1729. Without her, neither of these two important works would have been published.
Margaret appeared as a character in a play by Kevin Hood called The Astronomer's Garden.
Early life.
Daughter of a London lawyer she was a well-educated woman, both literate and numerate.
Life with the Astronomer Royal.
Margaret Flamsteed was 22 years old when she married the 46 year-old John Flamsteed; they were married 27 years.
Notebooks in her handwriting and from soon after the marriage, show a competency in, and willingness to learn, mathematics and astronomy. In one entry from John Flamsteed's notes it states the observation was done “solus cum sponsa” (alone with wife). This, and other clues, suggest that while Margaret was not a regular assistant, she was clearly able and willing to assist her husband in his nighttime observations. She also spent daylight hours copying or writing letters for her husband, especially later when his hand became shaky.
Margaret Flamsteed also acted as housekeeper for John, ensuring that his assistants, pupils, and visitors were cared for.
After John Flamsteed's death.
After John Flamsteeds death in 1719 Margaret oversaw the publication of both the Historia Coelestis Britannica in 1725 and the Atlas Coelestis in 1729. Margaret was assisted by Joseph Crosthwait and Abraham Sharp, two of John Flamsteed's assistants. The publishing of these two great works was an expensive process and one she had to complete while dealing with the complicated fallout of her husband's estate and with diminished funds as many of her savings were lost in the collapsing of the South Sea Bubble of 1720.
Margaret Flamsteed died aged 60 only one year after publication of the Atlas Coelestis.


Kathy Vivas

Anna Katherina Vivas (born 1972) is a Venezuelan astrophysicist recognized for her investigations of and finding up to 100 new and very distant RR Lyrae stars. They are between 13,000 and 220,000 light years from the Sun, and are considered some of the oldest in the Milky Way. Her research has enabled some of the first studies of the structure and properties of the whole halo of the Milky Way and not only its innermost parts. The observation was made possible by combining a telescope with a large format camera, allowing astronomers to cover large portions of the sky in a short amount of time.
Vivas is a physics graduate from the University of the Andes and astrophysics doctor from Yale University.
From 2002 to 2013 she served as researcher of the Francisco J. Duarte Astronomy Investigation Center (Llano del Hato National Astronomical Observatory), in the village of Llano del Hato in the Venezuelan Andes, near Apartaderos, about 50 kilometers north-east of Mérida, Mérida State.
In 2009 she received the Empresas Polar Lorenzo Mendoza Fleury Science Prize.


Middlesbrough meteorite

The Middlesbrough Meteorite fell in Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire, England on 14 March 1881.
The meteorite fell in the afternoon, hitting the ground around 3:35 pm. Although there were reports that sound generated as the object travelled through the Earth's atmosphere was heard in some areas of Yorkshire, the meteorite was unusual in that the sonic boom that would normally be associated with a meteorite entering the atmosphere was not heard by anyone who witnessed the fall, nor were there were any reports of either a fireball or smoke trail.
The site of the impact was at the railway siding "Pennymans's Siding", close to the site of the now demolished St. Luke's Hospital (now Roseberry Park). The impact was witnessed by workmen only yards away, who heard a "rushing or roaring" sound followed by thud, as the meteorite hit a nearby embankment, leaving a hole described by the astronomer Alexander Herschel as a "round vertical hole into which a man's arm might be thrust". The meteorite had penetrated to a depth of about 30 cm and was described as "new milk warm" to the touch by the workmen when they retrieved the object.
Herschel, who was then Professor of Physics and Experimental Sciences at Durham College of Physical Science in Newcastle upon Tyne, rushed to Middlesbrough on hearing the news to supervise the recovery and examination of the meteorite. By experimentation, replicating the conditions of the impact, he determined the speed of the object at the time was 412 feet per second (281 mph). This result was viewed as partial confirmation of a theory of the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli that meteorites lost most of their cosmic velocity (the velocity they had before entering the Earth's atmosphere), due to air resistance at a high altitude in the atmosphere.
The Middlesbrough meteorite is classified as a chondrite. It is approximately 4.5 billion years old and was formed at the same time as the Earth and the solar system. It is approximately 6 inches in diameter, weighs 3 pounds 8.75 ounces (approximately 1.5 kg) and has a crust of unusual thickness - it was recovered in one piece. A 3D scan of the object was made by NASA scientists in 2010.
Due to Middlesbrough not having a museum at the time of its fall to Earth, the meteorite was handed over to the Yorkshire Museum where it has been ever since. In March 2011, the 130th anniversary of its fall to Earth, it was lent to the town's Dorman Museum where it was put on display for several weeks.


Davinia Taylor

Davinia Taylor (born Davinia Murphy on 11 November 1977) is an English actress, socialite and interior designer, best known for playing Jude Cunningham in the soap opera "Hollyoaks".
Career.
Taylor starred in Channel 4 soap opera "Hollyoaks", playing party girl Jude Cunningham from 1996 to 1998.
The original "Hollyoaks" part led to roles in the television movies "Bostock's Cup", "Is Harry on the Boat?", the comedic film, "Soul Patrol", as well as a spot on an episode of "Urban Gothic", presenting work on "The Big Breakfast" and "Top of the Pops @ Play" and an appearance in the documentary series "Young, Hot and Talented" for Channel 5.
Taylor opened her own hair and beauty salon 'Taylor Made' in London in March 2011.
In 2016 Taylor returned to "Hollyoaks" after an 18-year absence.
Personal life.
Taylor's father, Alan Murphy, a multi-millionaire, ran the AM Paper toilet roll factory in Skelmersdale.
Taylor has frequently been featured in the British tabloid press, as part of the Primrose Hill set with Sadie Frost (actress and ex-wife of Jude Law), and supermodel Kate Moss.


Harry Goodwin (cricketer)

Harry Smyth Goodwin (30 September 1870 – 13 November 1955) was a cricketer of the nineteenth century, born in Glamorgan, Wales but playing for Gloucestershire between 1896 and 1907. A right-handed batsman, Goodwin was an alumnus of Rossall School in Lancashire, for whom he played two matches in 1889. He played 31 matches for Gloucestershire, though aside from the 1897 cricket season he often played only a small number of games each year. He scored 564 runs at a batting average of 12.40, and a best of 46. He was later President of Horsham Cricket Club.
Playing career.
Early life and cricket at Rossall.
Goodwin was born in 1870 in Merthyr Tydfil, at the time a mining town for iron ore, coal and limestone in Glamorgan, Wales. He was schooled in Lancashire, attending Rossall School and playing cricket there. In these school matches he batted in the top order, scoring five and 16 against Loretto School on 7 June 1889 while batting at three. He also took a five-wicket haul with his bowling though his bowling style is not recorded, and he did not bowl during his first class career. On 21 June he played against Malvern College and scored 72 and 15 opening the batting, but did not bowl.
Gloucestershire.
Goodwin's first match of the 1896 County Championship – his first class debut – came against Sussex on 25 May 1896. Batting at number six in an innings overshadowed by a score of 243 by WG Grace, Goodwin made 10 before being dismissed by Arthur Collins. Sussex were forced to follow on, and Goodwin dropped to ninth in the batting order and was not required to bat s second time as Gloucestershire chased a small target. On 18 June Goodwin played against Middlesex at Lord's. Again batting at nine, he made 12 and a duck.
Goodwin played only these two games in 1896, but he returned for Gloucestershire for the 1897 County Championship and enjoyed his most prolific season. He played ten games, scoring 239 runs at 21.72 including a high score of 44 not out which came against Sussex on 2 August, overshadowed once more by a Grace century. He also made 36 against Somerset on 19 August, however he was unable to make any lasting impact and played only one match in the 1898 season: scoring five against Sussex on 30 May. He did return more convincingly in 1899, playing five games including his career-high score of 46 made against Somerset on 28 August at Taunton, which was the highest score of the innings, and also a game against a touring Australian side though in this match he only made six. However, a batting average of 12.50 and only 100 runs scored in the season was not enough to secure a regular place in the Gloucestershire line-up. Goodwin managed only nine runs from his three games in 1900, and played only one match in 1901 and then did not appear for Gloucestershire for five years. Meanwhile he joined the staff of Christ's Hospital, an independent school in Horsham, in 1902.
On his return to cricket in 1906, he made two and 13 against Middlesex. He played two more game that season though he could not best that score of 13 and totalled only 26 runs across the year. In 1907, however, he played six matches and reached 117 runs for the season and a best of 34 made against Essex on 5 August. His final first class match came against a South African side that was on an England tour, where he made a pair – two scores of zero. He was dismissed each time by South African Test cricketer Ernie Vogler.
Later life.
Goodwin did not play first-class cricket again. He remained at Christ's Hospital and became President of Horsham Cricket Club. He retired from Christ's Hospital in 1930. He remained there, and died on school premises in 1955, aged 85 years.


Solar eclipse of January 27, 2093

A total solar eclipse will occur on January 27, 2093. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby totally or partly obscuring the image of the Sun for a viewer on Earth. A total solar eclipse occurs when the Moon's apparent diameter is larger than the Sun's, blocking all direct sunlight, turning day into darkness. Totality occurs in a narrow path across Earth's surface, with the partial solar eclipse visible over a surrounding region thousands of kilometres wide.


Haley Gomez

Haley Gomez (née Morgan) (born 1979) MBE is a Welsh Professor of Astrophysics at Cardiff University. She studies the formation and evolution of cosmic dust using the Herschel Space Observatory. She is Head of Public Engagement in the School of Physics and Astronomy. She was awarded an Order of the British Empire in the 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honour’s.
Early life and education.
Gomez was born in Barry and educated in a state school. She earned an undergraduate degree at Cardiff University in 2001. She was the first in her family to go to university and was inspired by Vera Rubin. She stayed at Cardiff University for her postgraduate study, where she completed a PhD with Mike Edmunds and Steve Eales. Her PhD thesis "The Origin and Evolution of Dust", explored the origins of smoke-sized particles in space. She graduated in 2004 and was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society prize for the best UK doctoral thesis.
Research and career.
Gomez was awarded a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 Fellowship which allowed her to remain at Cardiff University. She presented her research to Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace. She identified that supernovae could be factories of cosmic dust by using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope to study cold dust grains. She was appointed as a lecturer in 2013, a senior lecturer in 2014 and a Professor in 2015. Her research considers how cosmic dust grains form in elliptical galaxies. She has used the Akari satellite to survey the sky in the mid-infrared and identify the building blocks of life. Gomez continued to use the data from the Herschel Space Observatory long after it stopped operating in 2013.
As Head of Public Engagement in the School of Physics at Cardiff University, Gomez coordinates the outreach activities for schools, teachers and the public. With the National Assembly for Wales Science Academy, Gomez ran Universe in a Classroom "Universe in a Classroom" hopes to reach 60,000 children over ten years, and has already trained teachers from 130 Welsh primary schools. They have a small robotic telescope, education resources and learning based activities. until its end in 2018. She has partnered with the European "Inspiring Science Education" which provides schools and teachers simulations and data analysis tools to learn physics. She gives regular public lectures and has been featured at the Royal Albert Hall and National Museum of Wales, as well as in the Sky at Night Magazine and Astronomy Now. She has worked with Sense about Science and appeared on science podcasts. She is on the committee of WISE Campaign Wales. She was a speaker at the 2015 TEDxCardiff, where she discussed the origins of life.
She was elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales in 2017.


WASP-48b

WASP-48b is an extrasolar planet orbiting the star WASP-48 in the constellation Cygnus. The planet was detected using the transit method by the SuperWASP team, which published its discovery in 2011. It orbits its host star in just 2.14 days with a semi-major axis of 0.034 AU and has an equilibrium temperature of 1956 K. The dayside temperature was measured to be around 2300 K in 2018.
The planetary atmosphere transmission spectrum is gray and featureless, having no noticeable Rayleigh scattering.


Meade LX200

The Meade LX200 is a family of commercial telescopes produced by Meade Instruments launched in 1992 with 8" (20.32 cm) and a 10" (25.4 cm) Schmidt–Cassegrain models on computerized altazimuth mounts. Two larger models, a 12" (30.48 cm) and a 16" (40.64 cm), quickly followed. The original version was later informally named the "classic" LX200 as newer upgraded versions replaced it. The first of these was the LX200GPS, which featured global positioning system electronics. A LX200GPS was later added to the line.
The advantage of the LX200 was price for its performance, which was accomplished by using electronics and software to equal the pointing performance of more expensive systems. Software and optical encoders corrected for errors, and the telescope also came with auto-guiding CCD and planetarium software.
A related series introduced in 2005 was the even higher end RCX400 (later renamed LX400-ACF), with new optics and a motorized focus/collimation system, and with upgraded fork mount electronics. These were available in the same 8" (20.32 cm) to 16" (40.64) size range on the new fork mount, and the 16" (40.64 cm) optical tube assembly (OTA), along with a new 20" (50.8 cm) OTA, were available on a new German equatorial mount. These were all f/8 optical systems, costing up to $50,000 for the 20" on the German equatorial mount.
An f/10 version of the new optics later replaced the optics of the existing LX200GPS fork mount models, with the new product line now called the LX200R (later renamed LX200-ACF). The revised optics are called advanced coma free (ACF) after a lawsuit by Star Instruments and RC Optical Systems disallowed implying that they were based on Ritchey–Chrétien optics.
In September 2012, an amateur astronomer used an LX200GPS to record an impact on the planet Jupiter.
Installations.
Selected observatories with LX200 telescopes.


Comet de Vico

de Vico is the name of several comets discovered by Father Francesco de Vico, a Jesuit priest.


Triangulum Australe in Chinese astronomy

The modern constellation Triangulum Australe is not included in the Three Enclosures and Twenty-Eight Mansions system of traditional Chinese uranography because its stars are too far south for observers in China to know about them prior to the introduction of Western star charts. Based on the work of Xu Guangqi and the German Jesuit missionary Johann Adam Schall von Bell in the late Ming Dynasty, this constellation has been classified as one of the 23 Southern Asterisms (近南極星區, "Jìnnánjíxīngōu") under the name Triangle (三角形, "Sānjiǎoxíng").
The name of the western constellation in modern Chinese is 南三角座 ("nán sān jiǎo zuò"), meaning "the southern triangle constellation".
Stars.
The map of Chinese constellation in constellation Triangulum Australe area consists of :


(78799) 2002 XW93

, provisional designation , is a trans-Neptunian object and centaur from the outer Solar System, approximately in diameter. It was discovered on 10 December 2002, by astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in California. According to American astronomer Michael Brown, the minor planet is a likely dwarf planet.
Orbit and physical characteristics.
 orbits the Sun at a distance of 27.9–46.8 AU once every 228 years and 4 months (83,410 days; semi-major axis of 37.36 AU). Its orbit has an eccentricity of 0.25 and an inclination of 14° with respect to the ecliptic. The body's observation arc begins with a precovery published by the Digitized Sky Survey and taken Palomar in December 1989, or 13 years prior to its official discovery observation.
As of 2016, after a total of 29 observations, its orbital uncertainty parameter is at 3. Its last observation was made by the Hubble Space Telescope in September 2008. On 10 August 1926, it most recently reached perihelion, when it was nearest to the Sun. It is a near 5:7 resonant trans-Neptunian object.
Numbering and naming.
This minor planet was numbered by the Minor Planet Center on 15 April 2004. As of 2018, it has not been named.


Radio Ice Cherenkov Experiment

Radio Ice Cherenkov Experiment (RICE) was an experiment designed to detect the Cherenkov emission in the radio regime of the electromagnetic spectrum from the interaction of high energy neutrinos (greater than 1 PeV, so-called ultra-high energy UHE neutrinos) with the Antarctic ice cap (ice molecules). The goals of this experiment are to determine the potential of the radio-detection technique for measuring the high energy cosmic neutrino flux, determining the sources of this flux, and measuring neutrino-nucleon cross sections at energies above those accessible with existing accelerators. Such an experiment also has sensitivity to neutrinos from gamma ray bursts, as well as highly ionizing charged particles (monopoles, e.g.) traversing the Antarctic icecap.
The experiment operated 1999-2012 (prototypes before 1999, data-taking 1999-2010). The experiment's radio receivers were located 100–350 meters deep under the ice-sheet directly below the Martin A. Pomerantz Observatory (MAPO) at the South Pole Station. The MAPO-building housed the experiment's hardware. The drill holes housing the radio receivers were primarily drilled for the AMANDA and later (AMANDA was shut down 2009) IceCube experiments; RICE used the holes as a secondary experiment.
Experimental operation and results.
Two antennas were installed successfully during the 1995–96 austral summer. During the 1996–97 season, a prototype array of three antennas was deployed down the (AMANDA) bore holes at depths from 140–210 meters. This prototype demonstrated the ability to successfully deploy receivers and transmitters and enabled an estimate of the noise temperature in the deep ice. Several more receivers and transmitters were deployed in three new AMANDA holes during the 1997–1998 season, in dedicated (specifically drilled for RICE) shallow "dry" holes during the 1998–99 season, and finally in several AMANDA holes drilled during the 1999–2000 season. Five years of data-taking (two years of livetime) resulted in the most stringent upper limits on the neutrino flux in the interval 50 PeV – 1 EeV, as well as results on departures from Standard Model cross-sections and searches for gamma-ray burst coincidences. Currently, RICE hardware is being modified for use in the IceCube boreholes being drilled from 2006 to 2010.
In 2008-2009, the RICE experiment was extended into the Neutrino Array Radio Calibration (NARC) experiment. The continued experiment is known as RICE/NARC or just RICE.
In 2012, the results of the full dataset (collected 2000-2010) of RICE (RICE/NARC) were published and the RICE (RICE/NARC) experiment was described as "presently at the end of useful data-taking." No ultra-high energy (UHE) neutrinos were detected; this is in accordance with theoretic expectation.
The radio Cherenkov technique of detecting neutrinos is continued by RICE's successor experiment, Askaryan Radio Array (ARA), to which RICE hardware (and some of the researchers) was transferred. ARA is also deployed at the South Pole Station under ice. First ARA prototype was tested in South Pole in the Antarctic summer of 2010-2011.


Harry Arthur Crowhurst

Harry Arthur Crowhurst (14 March 1868 – 8 December 1943) was a photographer, optician and partner in a lantern and optical supply business.
Life and Times.
In 1868, Crowhurst was born at St George the Martyr, London. He was the son of William Henry and Julia Ann Crowhurst. He had one brother, Walter William, and 2 sisters, Ellen Mable and Julia May.
In 1943, he died at Southampton, Hampshire, England.
In 1891, the Census of England and Wales noted that Crowhurst, age 23, had the occupation as optician.
In 1900, he teamed with Harold Armytage Sanders to form the firm of Sanders and Crowhurst.
In 1901, the Census of England and Wales noted that Crowhurst, age 33, listed occupation as optician.
In May 1905, Crowhurst married the daughter of James Williamson, noted film pioneer, and took over the Williamson business.
W. Watson and Son.
W. Watson and Son was an optical instrument maker. In 1837, the William Watson business was established in London for the manufacture of optical instruments. By the 1840s, the company moved into lanterns, slides and associated equipment. In 1868, the name was changed to W. Watson & Son and by this time were located at 313 High Holborn, London. In the 1870s, the company added photographic equipment and became known as a leading manufacturer of the "Highest Class Photographic Instruments and Apparatus" in England. Into the 1940s, the company remained at 313 High Holborn, London, England.
Sanders & Crowhurst.
Established in 1900, Crowhurst teamed with Harold Armytage Sanders to form the firm of Sanders and Crowhurst that became an agent for W. Watson and Son. The going interest was to serve as lantern and slide dealers and also offer service as opticians. The partnership dissolved on 21 October 1908. When the partnership dissolved in 1908, Sanders continued in business as Sanders and Company at the Shaftesbury Avenue address, and Crowhurst continued in business at the Hove branch location.


International Lunar Exploration Working Group

International Lunar Exploration Working Group (ILEWG) is a public forum sponsored by the world's space agencies to support "international cooperation towards a world strategy for the exploration and utilization of the Moon - our natural satellite" (International Lunar Workshop, Beatenberg (CH), June 1994).
ILEWG was founded by several space agencies: ASA, ASI, BNSC, CNES, DARA, ESA, ISAS,
NASA, NASDA, RSA.
Operations and conferences.
ILEWG has been organising since 1994 the ICEUM International Conferences on Exploration & Utilisation of the Moon with published proceedings, and where community declarations have been prepared and endorsed by community participants. ILEWG has co-organised and co-sponsored lunar sessions at EGU, COSPAR, EPSC.
The 8th gathering was held on July 23–27, 2006, in Beijing, China, and agreed the new Lunar Beijing Declaration.
Members.
ILEWG Executive Director:  Prof. Bernard Foing (ILEWG Past-President, 1998 - 2000)
ILEWG Vice-presidents: Prof. Tai Sik Lee (2016 - current), Prof. Jacques Blamont (2010 - 2016), Dr. Simonetta di Pippo (2006 – 2008), Dr Robert Richards (2005 - 2007)
ILEWG Past-Presidents : Dr. Michael Wargo (2008 - 2010), Prof. Wu Ji (2006 - 2008), Prof. Narendra Bhandari (2004 - 2006), Prof Carle Pieters (2002 – 2004), Prof Mike Duke (2000-2002), Prof Bernard Foing (1998 – 2000), Acad. Erik Galimov (1996 – 1998), Dr Hitoshi Mizutani
Roadmap.
The roadmap or timeline envisaged includes a 15-year period of robotic operations before crewed missions. Robots would pilot in-situ resource utilisation and construct habitation for later crew.
EuroMoonMars.
As part of research efforts towards the colonization of Moon and eventually the colonization of Mars, ILEWG founded the EuroMoonMars initiative, which comprises field campaigns in Moon-Mars analogue environments.
The EuroMoonMars field campaigns have been organised in specific locations of technical, scientific and exploration interest. The campaigns started with EuroGeoMars2009 (Utah MDRS, 24 Jan-1 Mar 2009) with ILEWG, ESA ESTEC, NASA Ames, VU Amsterdam and GWU.
EMMIHS Campaigns.
Currently, ILEWG is collaborating with the International Moonbase Alliance (IMA) and the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) on a series of EuroMoonMars, IMA and HI-SEAS (EMMIHS) campaigns, at the HI-SEAS analogue facilities in Hawaii.
The Hawaii - Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) habitat is located at 8,200’ (2,500 meters) in elevation and IMA's founder, Henk Rogers, is its owner. As of 2018, IMA, an organization dedicated to building sustainable settlements on the Moon, has been organising regular simulated missions to the Moon, Mars or other planetary bodies at HI-SEAS. Dr. Michaela Musilova is the Director of HI-SEAS and she also takes part in missions as a Crew Commander, Flights Director or CAPCOM.
The EuroMoonMars campaigns consist of research activities for data analysis, instruments tests and development, field tests in Moon-Mars analogues, pilot projects, training and hands-on workshops and outreach activities.
EMM IgLuna 2019 Campaign.
IgLuna is the first ESA Lab inter-University demonstrator project, and is hosted by the Swiss Space Centre (SSC) with the vision to create an analogue habitat inside lunar ice caps. The campaigns were held from 17 to 30 June 2019 and involved 18 student teams from 9 countries across Europe. The students developed modular demonstrators and tested them during a field test conducted inside the moon-like extreme environment of the Glacier Palace inside the Matterhorn glacier.


Giovanni de Sanctis

Giovanni de Sanctis (born 1949) is an Italian astronomer and discoverer of minor planets at the Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino (Astronomical Observatory of Turin) in Turin, Italy. His name is sometimes spelt DeSanctis, particularly in the Minor Planet Circulars. The Minor Planet Center credits him with the discovery of 42 numbered minor planets, most of which he discovered at ESO's La Silla site in northern Chile in the early 1980s.
The Vestian asteroid 3268 De Sanctis was named by Henri Debehogne in honor of his co-discoverer. Naming citation was published on 22 June 1986 ().


Joseph Hoover Mackin

Joseph Hoover Mackin (November 16, 1905 – August 12, 1968) was an American geologist. As a tribute to him, a huge plateau in Antarctica bears the name Mackin Table and a large lunar crater named "Mackin" (originally named "Mackin-Apollo") marks the location of the Apollo 17 landing site.
Biography.
Mackin was born November 16, 1905, in Oswego, New York, the youngest of seven children of William David Mackin and Catherine Hoover Mackin. Hoover spent two years immobilized in a cast after being stricken with poliomyelitis at the age of four, but outgrew the effects of his childhood illness and eventually played football both at Oswego High School and Oswego Normal School. After graduation in 1924, Mackin entered New York University. Initially intending to become a journalist, he switched his major to geology after hearing lectures by Professor George I. Finley.
He received the B.S. degree in geology from NYU in 1930 and then entered the graduate school of Columbia University, where he was granted an M.A. degree in 1932. Mackin accepted an appointment as an instructor at the University of Washington and eventually received a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1936. His teaching career would span thirty-four years—twenty-eight years at Washington and six years as Farish Professor of Geology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Research.
While Mackin considered himself a geomorphologist, his bibliography reveals far greater scope to his actual research activities. In his doctoral thesis on the origin of surface features of the Big Horn Basin in Wyoming, he introduced the concept of lateral plantation by a stream essentially at grade, producing gravel-mantled terraces as the stream gradually deepens its valley, as opposed to formation of terraces by stream dissection of earlier alluvial plains. Mackin's further analysis led to publication in 1948 of the classic paper, "Concept of the Graded River", which has been cited over 700 times. In this paper Mackin refers to the rapidity with which a graded stream responds to artificial changes - a warning of profound importance to stream engineers against altering natural equilibrium by diversion or damming or channel-improvements.
One of Mackin's earliest papers, written with the famous British geologist E. B. Bailey, dealt with the complex folding in the Pennsylvania Piedmont area of the Pennsylvania Regions and the use of b-lineation in structural analysis. This paper was perhaps the first attempt to apply the concepts of recumbent folding and nappe structure to geologic interpretation of the piedmont. Since then, these concepts have been shown to be widely applicable. A by-product of the initial study was Mackin's 1950 paper on the "down structure" method of viewing and interpreting geologic maps.
In World War II, Mackin became affiliated with the U.S. Geologic Survey studying sources of strategic materials. His major effort, which continued after the end of World War II, was on the iron deposits of the Iron Springs District of Utah and also included, quicksilver deposits near Morton, Washington, and placer deposits containing radioactive minerals in Idaho. From these studies, Mackin demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt precisely where the iron that forms the major economic deposits of the district came from, how it was separated from the parent body of intrusive quartz monzonite, why it was deposited in adjacent limestone in the particular places now found, and when this process took place in the igneous and structural history of the area. In the course of the study, Mackin demonstrated that in certain types of magmatic flow, phenocrysts and inclusions become oriented normal, rather than parallel, to the direction of magma movement. Mackin's work is considered to have contributed significantly to the understanding of ore deposits and of granite tectonics.
In addition to teaching and research, Mackin was chairman of the Earth Sciences Division of the National Research Council from 1963 to 1965; delegate of the National Academy of Sciences to the 1967 meetings of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences in Istanbul and of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics in Zurich in the same year; and the keynote speaker at the Symposium on Pediments, held in Budapest early in 1968.
Mackin was selected as one of several experts to examine samples returned from the Moon. He participated actively in the early planning and design of the lunar geology experiments as a member of the U.S. Geological Survey team sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and he initiated the idea of a sampling tube to be driven into the lunar soil, which became nicknamed the “Hoov Tube.”
Honors.
Throughout his career Mackin was a guest lecturer at many universities, and was the Distinguished Lecturer for the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 1953 and National Lecturer for Sigma Xi in 1963. Mackin was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Geological Society of America (Council, 1950-1953; chairman of Cordilleran Section, 1950), the Society of Economic Geologists, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Sigma Xi.
Mackin died on August 12, 1968, while preparing to serve as delegate of the U.S. National Committee on Geology to the International Geological Congress to be held in Prague later in 1968. The University of Texas, where he taught, has an endowment benefiting geosciences, the J. Hoover Mackin Memorial Scholarship Fund. The Geological Society of America also offers a memorial scholarship for students in quaternary geology and geomorphology from the J. Hoover Mackin Award Fund.


Solar eclipse of December 27, 2065

A partial solar eclipse will occur on December 27, 2065.


Ye Shuhua

Ye Shuhua (; born June 21, 1927) is a Chinese astronomer and professor at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, known for achieving one of the world's most precise measurements of Universal Time in the 1960s, and for establishing the very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) and satellite laser ranging (SLR) techniques in China.
Ye served as President of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Vice-President of the Chinese Astronomical Society, and Vice-President of the International Astronomical Union. She is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a foreign fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society of Britain. The asteroid 3241 Yeshuhua is named after her.
Early life.
Ye Shuhua was born June 21, 1927 in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. She spent most of her school years during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), and had to move repeatedly with her family from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, Shaoguan, and Lian County, because of the war.
After the surrender of Japan in 1945, Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou resumed its admissions. Ye hoped to study literature at the university, but her father wanted her to study medicine for better career prospects. She was not interested in medicine, and as a compromise with her father, she agreed to study mathematics instead. At the time, mathematics and astronomy were under the same department at Sun Yat-sen University, and under the influence of Professor Zou Yixin, she later chose to major in astronomy.
Career.
In 1951, Ye Shuhua moved to Shanghai with her husband Cheng Jitai (), who taught at the mathematics department of Fudan University. Ye found work at the French-built Zikawei (Xujiahui) Observatory, which later became part of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory. In 1958, she became the leader of a team of scientists working to improve the precision of China's measurement of Universal Time, which ranked the last in the world. By 1963, China's Universal Time measurement leapt to the world's second most precise. It was set as the basic national standard in 1965, and her team later received many national awards for this achievement.
When the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, Ye Shushua, like many other intellectuals, was persecuted and held in a "cowshed" (). She also had to work as a house painter.
After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, Ye was appointed research professor of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, and served as its director between 1981 and 1993. Under her leadership, Shanghai Observatory established a very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) and a satellite laser ranging (SLR) research station, and participated in the International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) as one of the most technologically advanced bases. In 1991, she was appointed the chief scientist in a Key Basic Research Project to study China's crustal motion. The project verified that the Indian Plate is causing an eastward movement of China's land mass.
Ye Shuhua served as Vice-President of the Chinese Astronomical Society from 1978 to 1988, after which she became its honorary president. She served as Vice-President of the International Astronomical Union from 1988 to 1994. She was elected a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980, and a foreign fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society of Britain in 1985.
Honours and awards.
The Purple Mountain Observatory named the asteroid 3241 Yeshuhua after her. She has been awarded the Ho Leung Ho Lee Prize for astronomy.


Erika Hamden

Erika Tobiason Hamden is an American astrophysicist and Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona and Steward Observatory. Her research focuses on developing ultraviolet (UV) detector technology, ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy (UV/VIS) instrumentation and spectroscopy, and galaxy evolution. She served as the project scientist and project manager of a UV multi-object spectrograph, FIREBall-2, that is designed to observe the circumgalactic medium (CGM). She is a 2019 TED fellow.
Early life and education.
Hamden was born in Montclair, New Jersey. Hamden studied astrophysics at Harvard College and graduated in 2006. Hamden worked at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, completing a senior thesis under Andrew Szentgyorgyi. After graduating, she completed a diploma at Le Cordon Bleu in London, before working as a chef in New Jersey. She joined Columbia University for her doctoral studies in 2007, earning a PhD supervised by in 2014. She worked on the diffuse galactic far UV background using archival GALEX data, far UV bright galactic clouds, UV detector development, and ultraviolet instrumentation. She held a NASA Earth and Space Science fellowship from 2011 to 2014.
Career and research.
Hamden joined California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral researcher, working with Christopher Martin. Here she developed an ultraviolet telescope for a high-altitude balloon, the "Faint Intergalactic medium Redshifted Emission Balloon" (FIREBall-2). FIREBall-2 will observe circumgalactic media (CGM) emission in the ultraviolet. She appeared on the podcast 365 Days of Astronomy. She was a National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics postdoctoral fellow in 2014. The fellowship allowed her to develop instrumentation to study galaxies in the Keck Cosmic Web Imager redshift range. In 2016 she was the first woman to be awarded a NASA Nancy Roman technology fellowship for her work in detectors. She was made a Robert Andrews Millikan fellow in 2017.
Hamden joined the faculty at the University of Arizona and Steward Observatory in 2018. Here she is building a UV detector lab and continuing work on FIREBall-2 and as the project scientist for the Keck Cosmic Reionization Mapper.
She is interested in silicon detector technologies and Lyman-alpha emission from the circumgalactic media. She has worked on anti-reflective coatings for delta-doped CCDs, helping to improve their efficiency in the ultraviolet. FIREBall-2 was designed to test this new technology. The electron multiplying charge-coupled devices (EMCCDs) can suffer from clock-induced charge and spurious signals and require carefully designed shaped pixel clocks to minimize noise. She has worked as US lead on FIREBall-2 from 2014 to its launch on September 22, 2018. Hamden was present during integration of FIREBall-2 at Fort Sumner in 2018, when a falcon landed in the telescope.
Hamden is a member of the Goddard Space Flight Center Cosmic Origins Science Working Group. She is one of 20 people selected as TED fellow in 2019. Her TED Talk was selected by TED as a highlight of their April 2019 conference, and covered by Wired magazine.
Awards and honors.
Her awards and honors include


Uriah A. Boyden

Uriah Atherton Boyden (February 17, 1804 – October 17, 1879) was a civil and mechanical engineer and inventor from Foxborough, Massachusetts best known for the development of a water turbine, that later became known as the Boyden Turbine around 1844, while working for the Appleton Company in Lowell, Massachusetts. Boyden improved upon a turbine developed by French engineer Fourneyron by adding a conical approach passage for the incoming water—submerged diffusers, guide vanes and a diverting exit passage.
Uriah was also the younger brother of Seth Boyden, also a notable inventor who perfected a process for making patent leather, among other developments.
Early life.
Uriah Atherton Boyden was born in Foxborough, Massachusetts on February 17, 1804, the son of Seth Boyden and Susannah Atherton. His father was farmer and blacksmith who had invented a machine to split leather.
Career.
In 1813, Uriah moved to Newark, New Jersey to work in his elder brother Seth's leather shop. Around 1828, Uriah returned to Massachusetts where he worked on the early surveys for the Boston and Providence Railroad. He also worked under Loammi Baldwin on the dry dock at the Boston Navy Yard, as other mills in Lowell and the Boston and Lowell Railroad.
While at Lowell, Boyden worked with British-born engineer James B. Francis, who in 1848 developed the Francis turbine, which superseded Boyden's earlier invention. However, Boyden-type turbines continued to be manufactured, including those installed at Harmony Mills in Cohoes, New York in the early 1870s, and those used at the first Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant in 1895.
In 1850, Boyden settled in Boston, and devoted himself to the study of chemistry and physics. He never married. He died in Boston on October 17, 1879.
Legacy.
Upon his death in 1879, Boyden's will left about a quarter of a million dollars to a suitable astronomical institution that would build an observatory on a mountain for the better atmospheric seeing conditions than those available at lower altitudes.
His heirs challenged the will, but it was found valid. In 1887, Edward Charles Pickering convinced the trustees of Boyden's will to award the Boyden Fund to Harvard College Observatory, of which he was director. Although he initially planned to establish an observatory at Mount Wilson, those plans were abandoned (although the Mount Wilson Observatory was later built by a different group). Instead, needing an observation station for southern hemisphere skies, Harvard College Observatory established the "Boyden Station" at Arequipa, Peru in 1889.
In 1927, Boyden Station was moved to South Africa due to better weather conditions and became known as the Boyden Observatory.
Uriah also contributed to the Boyden Public Library in his hometown of Foxborough, Massachusetts. The National Museum of American History in Washington, DC is home to the Uriah A. Boyden Papers.
Ancestry.
His maternal ancestors had resided in Lancaster, Massachusetts having been pioneer settlers to the area. He is a direct descendant of James Atherton, who arrived in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in the 1630s. The Atherton family ancestry originated from Lancashire, England.


Edwin Dunkin

Edwin Dunkin FRS, FRAS (19 August 1821 – 26 November 1898) was a Cornish astronomer and the president of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Institution of Cornwall.
Birth and family.
He was born 19 August 1821, the son of William Dunkin (1781 – 3 July 1838) and Mary Elizabeth (1797–1873), the daughter of David Wise, a Redruth surgeon. He was the third son of a family of four brothers and a sister.
His father worked as a computer for "The Nautical Almanac" in Truro, Cornwall. In 1832 the family moved to London, where his father worked for the London office of "The Nautical Almanac".
Education.
He and his younger brother, Richard (1823–1895) were educated at Wellington House Academy, Hampstead, and at M. Liborel's school in Guînes in the Pas de Calais.
Career.
In 1838 his father died and his mother remarried. He returned to London to seek work, and, on the recommendation of Davies Gilbert and Lieutenant Stratford, was employed at the Royal Greenwich Observatory as a computer. George Airy, the astronomer royal, was soon impressed by him, and in 1840 Dunkin was promoted to a post in the new magnetic and meteorological department, becoming a permanent member of the observatory's staff in 1845.
Personal life.
He married in 1838 Maria Hadlow of Peckham, a stockbroker's daughter. He always maintained his Cornish connections, naming his villa in Blackheath "Kenwyn", after the village near Truro. Dunkin died at Brook Hospital in Kidbrook on 26 November 1898 after a short illness. He was survived by one son, Edwin Hadlow Wise Dunkin, author of "The Monumental Brasses of Cornwall with Descriptive, Genealogical and Heraldic Notes", 1882.
Scientific work.
Dunkin's meticulous accuracy and dependability led to him being given charge of a number of investigations, including the adjustment and error quantification of instruments such as Greenwich's new lunar azimuth and transit circle, and the expedition to Norway in 1851 to observe the total eclipse.
Airy also used Dunkin as a reliable "man on the spot" in various non-Greenwich activities, including pendulum experiments at Harton colliery, and the determinations of the longitudes of the Brussels and Paris observatories. In 1881, on Airy's retirement, Dunkin was promoted to chief assistant, or Deputy Astronomer Royal, holding that post until he retired in 1884.
Dunkin was a highly sociable man. In 1845 he was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society, and in 1884 was elected its president. He was delighted to be elected to the RAS Dining Club in 1868, becoming its president in 1880. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1876 and later served on the Council of the Royal Society. He was President of the Royal Institution of Cornwall in 1890 and 1891.
A prolific writer and popular communicator of astronomy, he wrote many articles for "The Leisure Hour" and other periodicals, in addition to his scientific papers. His most famous work was "The Midnight Sky", with detailed charts of the London sky, all of which he had computed himself.
Publications.
Publications of Edwin Dunkin, listed in "Bib Corn":


Qingming (solar term)

Qīngmíng, "Seimei", "Cheongmyeong" or "Thanh minh", is the name of the 5th solar term of the traditional Chinese lunisolar calendar, which divides a year into 24 solar terms ( 節氣/ 节气). In space partitioning, Qingming begins when the sun reaches the celestial longitude of 15° and ends when it reaches the longitude of 30°. It more often refers in particular to the day when the sun is exactly at the celestial longitude of 15°, usually on April 5.
Compared to the space partitioning theory, in the time division theory Qingming falls around April 7 or approximately 106.5 days after winter equinox. In the Gregorian calendar, it usually begins around 4 or 5 April and ends around 20 April.
Pentads.
Each solar term can be divided into 3 pentads (候). They are: first pentad (初候), second pentad (次候) and last pentad (末候). Pentads in Qingming include:


Derek Walker-Smith, Baron Broxbourne

Derek Colclough Walker-Smith, Baron Broxbourne, (13 April 1910 – 22 January 1992), known as Sir Derek Walker-Smith, Bt, from 1960 to 1983, was a British Conservative Party politician.
The son of Sir Jonah Walker-Smith (1874–1964) and his wife Maud, daughter of Coulton Walker Hunter, Walker-Smith was educated at Rossall School and Christ Church, Oxford. He became a barrister, called to the bar by Middle Temple in 1934. He was vice-chairman of the Inns of Court Conservative and Unionist Society and was made Queen's Counsel in 1955.
Walker-Smith was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Hertford from 1945 to 1955, and East Hertfordshire from 1955 to 1983. He was vice-chair of the 1922 Committee 1951–55. He held ministerial positions, including Economic Secretary to the Treasury (1956–57), at the Board of Trade (1955–56 and 1957), and Health (1957–59).
Walker-Smith was created a baronet, of Broxbourne in the County of Hertford, in 1960. On 21 September 1983, he was elevated to a life peerage as Baron Broxbourne, "of Broxbourne in the County of Hertfordshire". The life barony became extinct on his death aged 81 in 1992 while he was succeeded in the hereditary baronetcy by his son Jonah.


Mehalso Observatory

Mehalso Observatory is an astronomical observatory owned and operated by Penn State Erie. A gift from Dr. Robert Mehalso and his wife, Elizabeth, it is located in Erie, Pennsylvania (USA).


Frank Schlesinger

Frank Schlesinger (May 11, 1871 – July 10, 1943) was an American astronomer. His work concentrated on using photographic plates rather than direct visual studies for astronomical research.
Biography.
Schlesinger was born in New York City and attended public schools there. He graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1890. He then worked as a surveyor, becoming a special student in astronomy at Columbia in 1894. In 1896, he received a fellowship which enabled him to study full-time, and he received a Ph.D. in 1898. After his graduation, he spent the summer at Yerkes Observatory as a volunteer assisting director George Ellery Hale.
He was an observer in charge of the International Latitude Observatory, Ukiah, California, in 1898. From 1899 to 1903, he was an astronomer at Yerkes, where he pioneered the use of photographic methods to determine stellar parallaxes. He was director of Allegheny Observatory from 1903 to 1920 and Yale University Observatory from 1920 to 1941.
At Yale he worked extensively with Ida Barney. He compiled and published the Yale Bright Star Catalogue. The first publication of the results of this work started in 1925 ("Transactions of the Yale University Observatory", v. 4) and the work concluded in the 1980s. He made major contributions to astrometry. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society (1912), the National Academy of Sciences (1916) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and served as president of the American Astronomical Society (1919–1922), and the International Astronomical Union (1932–1935).
Asked how to say his name, he told "The Literary Digest" "The name is so difficult for those who do not speak German that I am usually called "sles'in-jer", to rhyme with "messenger". It is, of course, of German origin and means 'a native of Schlesien' or Silesia. In that language the pronunciation is "shlayzinger", to rhyme with "singer"."
Family.
He married Eva Hirsch in 1900 while in Ukiah. They had one child, Frank Wagner Schlesinger, who later directed planetariums in Philadelphia and Chicago. His wife died in 1928, and in 1929 he married Mrs. Katherine Bell (Rawling) Wilcox.


Hiding in the Light

"Hiding in the Light" is the fifth episode of the American documentary television series "". It premiered on April 6, 2014 on Fox and aired on April 7, 2014 on National Geographic Channel. The episode explores properties of light, cameras, the scientific method, and the composition of the universe. The episode includes a look at the contributions of the 10th century physicist Ibn al-Haytham, described as the "father of the modern scientific method".
The episode was received positively by critics, with many remarking on the brilliant visuals of the end sequence completed with Rhapsody in Blue "showcasing the same image of New York City, viewed through the filters of various wavelengths of light: visible, infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray, gamma ray, microwave, and even a radio image". The episode maintained the previous week's 18-49 rating/share of 1.5/4, with 3.98 million American viewers watching on Fox.
Episode summary.
This episode explores the wave theory of light as studied by mankind, noting that light has played an important role in scientific progress, with such early experiments from over 2000 years ago involving the camera obscura by the Chinese philosopher Mozi. Tyson describes the work of the 11th century Arabic scientist Ibn al-Haytham, considered to be one of the first to postulate on the nature of light and optics leading to the concept of the telescope, as well as one of the first researchers to use the scientific method.
Tyson proceeds to discuss the nature of light as discovered by mankind. Work by Isaac Newton using refraction through prisms demonstrated that light was composed of the visible spectrum, while findings of William Herschel in the 19th century showed that light also consisted of infrared rays. Joseph von Fraunhofer would later come to discover that by magnifying the spectrum of visible light, gaps in the spectrum would be observed. These Fraunhofer lines would later be determined to be caused by the absorption of light by electrons in moving between atomic orbitals when it passed through atoms, with each atom having a characteristic signature due to the quantum nature of these orbitals. This since has led to the core of astronomical spectroscopy, allowing astronomers to make observations about the composition of stars, planets, and other stellar features through the spectral lines, as well as observing the motion and expansion of the universe, and the existence of dark matter.
Reception.
Ratings.
The episode's premiere on Fox brought a 1.5/4 in the 18-49 rating/share, with an audience of 3.98 million American viewers. It placed third and last in its timeslot behind "Resurrection" and "Believe"; and twelfth out of fifteenth for the night.


Supergiant


Jupiter LXIV

Jupiter LXIV, originally known as S/2017 J 3, is an outer natural satellite of Jupiter. It was discovered by Scott S. Sheppard and his team in 2017, but not announced until July 17, 2018 via a Minor Planet Electronic Circular from the Minor Planet Center. It is about 2 kilometers in diameter and orbits at a semi-major axis of about 20,694,000 km with an inclination of about 147.9°. It belongs to the Ananke group.


July 2046 lunar eclipse

A partial lunar eclipse will take place on July 18, 2046.
Related lunar eclipses.
Half-Saros cycle.
A lunar eclipse will be preceded and followed by solar eclipses by 9 years and 5.5 days (a half saros). This lunar eclipse is related to two total solar eclipses of Solar Saros 127.


Model spectrum

A model spectrum is an artificial spectrum of a star made by recreating the absorption or emission features seen in the spectrum. A model spectrum will usually be of a specific spectral type of star. It may include other properties of the star, such as a surrounding nebula, presence or lack of an extended atmosphere, or a circumstellar dust disc.


Soil stabilization

Soil stabilization a general term for any physical, chemical, mechanical, biological or combined method of changing a natural soil to meet an engineering purpose. Improvements include increasing the weight bearing capabilities, tensile strength, and overall performance of in-situ subsoils, sands, and waste materials in order to strengthen road pavements.
Some of the renewable technologies are: enzymes, surfactants, biopolymers, synthetic polymers, co-polymer based products, cross-linking styrene acrylic polymers, tree resins, ionic stabilizers, fiber reinforcement, calcium chloride, calcite, sodium chloride, magnesium chloride and more. Some of these new stabilizing techniques create hydrophobic surfaces and mass that prevent road failure from water penetration or heavy frosts by inhibiting the ingress of water into the treated layer.
However, recent technology has increased the number of traditional additives used for soil stabilization purposes. Such non-traditional stabilizers include: Polymer based products (e.g. cross-linking water-based styrene acrylic polymers that significantly improves the load-bearing capacity and tensile strength of treated soils), Copolymer Based Products, fiber reinforcement, calcium chloride, and Sodium Chloride.
Soil can also be stabilized mechanically with stabilization geosynthetics, for example, geogrids or geocells, a 3D mechanical soil stabilization technique. Stabilization is achieved via confinement of particle movement to improve the strength of the entire layer. Confinement in geogrids is by means of interlock between the aggregate and grid (and tensioned membrane), and in geocells, by cell wall confinement (hoop) stress on the aggregate.
Traditionally and widely accepted types of soil stabilization techniques use products such as bitumen emulsions which can be used as a binding agents for producing a road base. However, bitumen is not environmentally friendly and becomes brittle when it dries out. Portland cement has been used as an alternative to soil stabilization. However, this can often be expensive and is not a very good Environmentally friendly alternative. Cement fly ash, lime fly ash (separately, or with cement or lime), bitumen, tar, cement kiln dust (CKD), tree resin and ionic stabilizers are all commonly used stabilizing agents. Other stabilization techniques include using on-site materials including sub-soils, sands, mining waste, natural stone industry waste and crushed construction waste to provide stable, dust free local roads for complete dust control and soil stabilization.
There are advantages and disadvantages to many of these soil stabilizers.
Many of the environmentally friendly alternatives have essentially the same formula as soap powders, merely lubricating and realigning the soil with no effective binding property. Many of the new approaches rely on large amounts of clay with its inherent binding properties.
Bitumen, tar emulsions, asphalt, cement, lime can be used as a binding agents for producing a road base. When using such products issues such as safety, health and the environment must be considered.
The National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) has explored some of the newer types of soil stabilization technology, specifically looking for effective and non-harmful alternatives. One of the examples utilizes new soil stabilization technology, a process based on cross-linking styrene acrylic polymer. Another example uses long crystals to create a closed cell formation that is impermeable to water and is frost, acid, and salt resistant.
Utilizing new soil stabilization technology, a process of cross-linking within the polymeric formulation can replace traditional road/house construction methods in an environmentally friendly and effective way.
There is another soil stabilization method called the Deep Mixing method that is non-destructive and effective at improving load bearing capacity of weak or loose soil strata. This method uses a small, penny-sized injection probe and minimizes debris. This method is ideal for re-compaction and consolidation of weak soil strata, increasing and improving load bearing capacity under structures and the remediation of shallow and deep sinkhole problems. This is particular efficient when there is a need to support deficient public and private infrastructure.
Magnesium chloride.
Water absorbing magnesium chloride (deliquescent) attributes include
However, limitations include
The use of magnesium chloride on roads remains controversial. Advocates claim (1) Cleaner air, which leads to better health as fugitive dust can cause health problems in the young, elderly and people with respiratory conditions; and (2) Greater safety through improved road conditions, including increased driver visibility and decreased risks caused by loose gravel, soft spots, road roughness and flying rocks. It reduces foreign sediment in nearby surface waters (dust that settles in creeks and streams), helps prevent stunted crop growth caused by clogged pores in plants, and keeps vehicles and property cleaner. Other studies show the use of salts for road deicing or dust suppressing can contribute substantial amounts of chloride ions to runoff from surface of roads treated with the compounds. The salts MgCl2 (and CaCl2) are very soluble in water and will dissociate. The salts, when used on road surfaces, will dissolve during wet weather and be transported into the groundwater through infiltration and/or runoff into surface water bodies. Groundwater infiltration can be a problem and the chloride ion in drinking water is considered a problem when concentrations exceed 250 mg/l. It is therefore regulated by the U.S. EPA’s drinking water standards. The chloride concentration in the groundwater or surface water depends on several factors including:
In addition, the chloride concentration in the surface water also depends on the size or flow rate of the water body and the resulting dilution achieved. In chloride concentration studies carried out in Wisconsin during a winter deicing period, runoff from roadside drainages were analyzed. All studies indicated that the chloride concentration increased as a result of deicing activities but the levels were still below the MCL of 250 mg/L set by the EPA. Nevertheless, the long-term effect of this exposure is not known.
Although the U.S. EPA has set the maximum chloride concentration in water for domestic use at 250 mg/l animals can tolerate higher levels. At excessively high levels, chloride is said to affect the health of animals. As stated by the National Technical Advisory Committee to the Secretary of Interior (1968), “Salinity may have a two-fold effect on wildlife; a direct one affecting the body processes of the species involved and an indirect one altering the environment making living species perpetuation difficult or impossible.” One major problem associated with the use of deicing salt as far as wildlife is concerned is that wildlife are known to have “salt craving” and therefore are attracted to salted highways which can be a traffic hazard to both the animals and motorists.
Regarding the accumulation of chloride salts in roadside soils including the adverse effects on roadside plants and vegetation physiology and morphology, documentation dates back to World War II era times and consistently continues forward to present times. As far as plants and vegetation are concerned, the accumulation of salts in the soil adversely affects their physiology and morphology by: increasing the osmotic pressure of the soil solution, by altering the plant’s mineral nutrition, and by accumulating specific ions to toxic concentrations in the plants. Regarding the intentional application of excessive salts: see Salting the Earth.
Road departments and private industry may apply liquid or powdered magnesium chloride to control dust and erosion on unimproved (dirt or gravel) roads and dusty job sites such as quarries because it is relatively inexpensive to purchase and apply. Its hygroscopy makes it absorb moisture from the air, limiting the number of smaller particles (silts and clays) that become airborne. The most significant benefit of applying dust control products is the reduction in gravel road maintenance costs. However, recent research and updates indicate biological toxicity in the environment in plants as an ongoing problem. Since 2001, truckers have complained about "Killer Chemicals" on roads and now some states are backing away from using salt products.
Also a small percentage of owners of indoor arenas (e.g. for horse riding) may apply magnesium chloride to sand or other "footing" materials to control dust. Although magnesium chloride use in an equestrian (horse) arena environment is generally referred to as a dust suppressant it is technically more accurate to consider it as a water augmentation activity since its performance is based on absorbing moisture from the air and from whatever else comes in contact with it.
To control or mitigate dust, chlorides need moisture to work effectively so it works better in humid than arid climates. As the humidity increases the chloride draw moisture out of the air to keep the surface damp and as humidity decreases it diffuses and releases moisture. These naturally occurring equilibrium changes also allow chlorides to also be used as a dehydrating agent including the drying out of and curing and preservation of hides.
As a road stabilizer, magnesium chloride binds gravel and clay particles to keep them from leaving the road. The water-absorbing (hygroscopic) characteristics of magnesium chloride prevent the road from drying out, which keeps gravel on the ground. The road remains continually "wet" as if a water truck had just sprayed the road.


Primstav


Rebecca Elson

Rebecca Anne Wood Elson (2 January 1960 – 19 May 1999) was a Canadian–American astronomer and writer.
Early life and education.
Rebecca "Becky" Anne Wood Elson was born in Montreal, Quebec, to Jeanne Bridgman, "née" Hickey and John Albert Elson (1923–2010), a geologist and professor at McGill University. Her older sister, Sally was born in 1958. As a teenager Elson often travelled Canada with her geologist father as he performed field research.
Elson matriculated in 1976, at the age of 16. After initially choosing Biology, (with a particular interest in Genetics) and then transferring to Astronomy she earned a bachelor's degree from Smith College, where she was taught by Waltraut Seitter. Her degree included a placement at St Andrews University in Scotland.
Elson gained a master's degree in Physics from the University of British Columbia, funded by a postgraduate fellowship from the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, resulting a thesis ‘A"n investigation of models of dynamical friction"'. During this time she undertook summer study visits to the University of St Andrews, and the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, which lead to her first published research article and her interest in globular clusters of stars.
Elson undertook her PhD (1982 - 1986) at the Institute of Astronomy and Christ’s College Cambridge University where she was awarded an Isaac Newton Studentship, an overseas research student award, and a vice chancellor’s bursary.
Her primary supervisor was S. Michael Fall and while working on her PhD she spent time at the Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra and Siding Spring observatory Coonabarabran, New South Wales, working under Ken Freeman.
This period led to several scientific articles, and her PhD thesis, ‘"The rich star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud"’ which developed the EFF luminosity profile and resulted in the discovery of unexpectedly extended profiles in star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Career in astronomy.
Elson did her postdoctoral work at the Institute for Advanced Study under the supervision of John N. Bahcall, continuing her star cluster work using ground-based telescopes when plans to use the new capabilities of the Hubble space telescope were affected by its delayed launch following the Challenger space shuttle disaster.
In 1987, she was the first-named author on a major review article on star clusters for the "Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics", after which she took up a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe College in 1989, where she taught creative writing, followed by a term teaching a Harvard expository writing course on science and ethics.
In 1989 she was the youngest astronomer selected to serve on a US National Academy of Sciences decennial review of the field.
In the early 1990s she returned to the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge to accept the research position she would hold for the remainder of her life. Her work centered on globular clusters, chemical evolution and galaxy formation. In April 1990 as the first images were released from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers were disappointed that the images were spoiled by the aberration in the space telescope mirror. When Hubble was repaired the resulting sharp images led to an acceleration of research, Elson's team successfully bidding for one of the largest allocations of orbits at that time.
Author.
A volume of wide-ranging poetry and essays she wrote from her teens until shortly before her death was published posthumously as "A Responsibility to Awe" in 2001 in the United Kingdom, and in 2002 in the United States. The works were selected by her husband Angelo di Cintio and a friend and fellow poet, Anne Berkeley, from a much larger body of unpublished efforts. Some of the works refer to vast concepts of physics and astronomy, often in unexpectedly abstract or playful ways, to reflect aspects of human experience. Others reflect profound joy with life or poignant observations of her impending death. The collection was selected as one of the best books of the year by "The Economist".
Elson was lead author on or contributed to seventy-one scientific contributions, including thirty-eight major articles in the refereed scientific literature research papers in her short career.
Death and legacy.
Elson was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at the age of 29. With treatment, it went into remission, and in 1996, she married the Italian artist Angelo di Cintio. However, the cancer returned soon afterwards. Elson died of the disease in Cambridge in May 1999, at the age of 39.
Rebecca Elson's biography was published by the "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography" on 13 August 2020 as part of their collection of biographies of astronomers and mathematicians.


Peter Jenniskens

Petrus Matheus Marie (Peter) Jenniskens (born 2 August 1962, in Horst) is a Dutch and American astronomer and a senior research scientist at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute and at NASA Ames Research Center. He is an expert on meteor showers. Jenniskens is the author of the 790 page book "Meteor Showers and their Parent Comets" published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. Jenniskens is president of Commission 22 of the International Astronomical Union (2012-2015) and was chair of the Working Group on Meteor Shower Nomenclature (2006–2012) after it was first established. Discovered at Ondřejov Observatory by Petr Pravec, asteroid "42981 Jenniskens" is named in his honor.
In 2008, Jenniskens together with Muawia Shaddad, led a team from the University of Khartoum in Sudan that recovered fragments of asteroid 2008 TC3 in the Nubian Desert, marking the first time meteorite fragments had been found from an object that was previously tracked in outer space before hitting Earth.
NASA Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaigns.
Meteor showers.
Jenniskens is the principal investigator of NASA's Leonid Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign (Leonid MAC), a series of four airborne missions that fielded modern instrumental techniques to study the 1998 - 2002 Leonids meteor storms. These missions helped develop meteor storm prediction models, detected the signature of organic matter in the wake of meteors as a potential precursor to origin-of-life chemistry, and discovered many new aspects of meteor radiation.
More recent meteor shower missions include the Aurigid Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign (Aurigid MAC), which studied a rare September 1, 2007, outburst of Aurigids from long-period comet C/1911 N1 (Kiess), and the Quadrantid Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign (Quadrantid MAC), which studied the January 3, 2008, Quadrantids. Since October 2010, Jenniskens has developed the global Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) project to map our meteor showers. Meteor showers are detected by triangulating the path of meteors recorded in a low-light video camera surveillance of the night sky displayed at .
Jenniskens identified several important mechanisms of how our meteor showers originate. Since 2003, Jenniskens identified the Quadrantids parent body , and several others, as new examples of how fragmenting comets are the dominant source of meteor showers. These objects are now recognized as the main source of our zodiacal dust cloud. Before that, he predicted and observed the 1995 Alpha Monocerotids meteor outburst (with members of the Dutch Meteor Society), proving that "stars fell like rain at midnight" because the dust trails of long-period comets wander on occasion in Earth's path.
Spacecraft reentries.
His research also includes artificial meteors. An overview of ongoing missions can be found at: . Jenniskens is the principal investigator of NASA's Genesis and Stardust Entry Observing Campaigns to study the fiery return from interplanetary space of the Genesis (Sep. 2004), Stardust (Jan. 2006), and Hayabusa (June 2010) sample return capsules. The beautiful reentry of JAXA's Hayabusa probe over Australia on 13 June 2010 also included the disintegrating main spacecraft. These airborne missions studied what physical conditions the protective heat shield endured during the reentry before being recovered.
More recently, Jenniskens led a mission to study the destructive entry of ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle "Jules Verne" on 29 September 2008, Orbital ATK's Cygnus OA6 reentry on 22 June 2016, and the spectacular daytime re-entry of space debris object WT1190F near Sri-Lanka to practice a future observation of an impacting asteroid.
Small asteroid impacts and meteorite recovery.
fragments recovery.
The recovery of fragments of asteroid marked the first time fragments had been found from an object that was previously tracked in outer space before hitting Earth. This search was led by Peter Jenniskens and Muawia Shaddad of the University of Khartoum in Sudan, and carried out with help from students and staff of the University of Khartoum. The search of the impact zone began on December 6, 2008 and turned up of rocks in about 600 fragments. This also proved the first well documented recovery of many different meteorite types from a single fall.
Sutter's Mill.
The next biggest impact over land occurred in California's gold country on April 22, 2012. One of the fragments landed at Sutter's Mill, the very site where gold was first discovered in 1848 that led to the California Gold Rush. Jenniskens found one of three fragments of this CM chondrite on April 24, before rains hit the area. The rapid recovery was made possible because Doppler weather radar detected the falling meteorites. A consortium study led by Jenniskens traced these meteorites back to a source region in the asteroid belt: a family of asteroids that move at low inclination and are close to the 3:1 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter.These were the first CM chondrites to be recovered from near the surface of the original parent body before it broke up, creating the asteroid family.
Novato.
Half a year later, in the evening of October 17, 2012, a bright fireball was seen near San Francisco. The first Novato meteorite, a L6 type chondrite fragmental breccia, was found by Novato resident Lisa Webber following Jenniskens' publication of the trajectory of the fireball from video recorded by stations of his Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance project (CAMS).
Chelyabinsk.
Three weeks after the February 15, 2013, Chelyabinsk meteor, Jenniskens participated in a Russian Academy of Sciences fact finding mission to Chelyabinsk Oblast. Over 50 villages were visited to map the extent of the glass damage. Traffic video records were collected to map the shock wave arrival times. In order to determine the meteoroid entry speed and angle, star background calibration images were taken and shadow obstacle dimensions were measured at sites where video cameras recorded the fireball and its shadows. Eyewitnesses were interviewed to learn about injuries, heat sensations, sunburn, smells and where meteorites were found. Meteorites found shortly after the fall by Chelyabinsk State University colleagues were analyzed and the results from this consortium study were published in Science.
Other research.
In earlier collaborations, he discovered that an unusual viscous form of liquid water can be a common form of amorphous ice in comets and icy satellites (during a post-doc study with David F. Blake) and he created the first broad detection-limited survey of Diffuse Interstellar Bands in his PhD thesis work with Xavier Désert.


Rachel Webster

Rachel Lindsey Webster (born 3 July 1951), is an Australian astrophysicist who became the second female professor of physics in Australia. Her main focus areas are extragalactic astronomy and cosmology; she researches black holes and the first stars of the universe. Webster has a doctoral degree from Cambridge University and has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Toronto and University of Melbourne.
Early life.
Rachel Webster was born on 3 July 1951, in North East Victoria. She began her schooling at Tallangatta Primary School and then moved to Melbourne at the age of six, where she attended Blackburn South Primary School and later Presbyterian Ladies College in Melbourne. Her father was an engineer and her mother a geography teacher; both encouraged Webster's interest in physics, science and mathematics from a young age. Webster was inspired to pursue astronomy after she attended a lecture at the University of Sydney in her final year of school. The lecture was on cosmology, presented by Robert May, one of Australia's most celebrated scientists.
Career.
Webster graduated from Monash University in Melbourne in 1975 with a degree in astrophysics. However, let down by her experiences in the university, Webster found herself within the Victorian Government's Public Works department, where she bought and sold real estate. After four years of success in that work, in her mid twenties Webster realised that she was not being completely fulfilled. This lead her to write to Martin Rees, the head of astronomy at Cambridge University, who encouraged her to gain a master's degree in physics prior to being enrolled. Webster completed an MSc at the University of Sussex in 1980 and, in 1985, completed her PhD on Gravitational Lensing and Cosmology at Cambridge University. She then undertook a postdoctoral position at the University of Toronto focussing on the Einstein Cross, a gravitationally lensed quasar.
In 1992, Rachel Webster returned to the University of Melbourne, where she received a grant for research related to the Parkes Quasar Survey. She was primarily concerned with how galaxies bend light, known as gravitational lensing. Today, her research group uses equipment including the Australia Telescope Compact Array, the Gemini telescopes, the Hubble Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Webster is a member of the International Consortium, helping to design a new low-frequency radio telescope, to be installed in Western Australia. Webster's ultimate aim is to identify the first sources of the universe. This information is being uncovered via her studies and detection of reionised hydrogen atoms and the structural analysis of neutral hydrogen clouds. She has also conducted research into quasar emission regions, cosmology, the Murchison Widefield Array and dark matter.
Webster has been the chair of the National Committee of Astronomy and co-created a Women in Physics Program, which has helped increase the number of women graduating in physics at the University of Melbourne.
Honors and awards.
Webster is also President of Academic Board at The University of Melbourne and has been awarded the Robert Ellery Lectureship.


Francesco Sizzi

Francesco Sizzi, an Italian astronomer who lived during the 17th century, is credited with being the first to notice the annual movement of sunspots.
He also argued against the existence of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter, discovered by Galileo in 1610. In 1611, he published a book, Dianoia astronomica, optica, physica, qua Syderei Nuncij rumor de quatuor planetis à Galilaeo Galilaeo mathematico celeberrimo recens perspicillì cuiusdam ope conspectis, vanus redditur. Auctore Francisco Sitio Florentino, (in Latin; approximate translation of its title: "Understanding of astronomy, optics, and physics, about a rumor in Sidereus Nuncius about the four planets seen by the very celebrated mathematician Galileo Galilei with his telescope, shown to be unfounded."). His main argument was an astrological one (book page 16). In the macrocosm, there are seven planets: two favorable ("beneficas") ones, two unfavorable ("maleficas") ones, two luminaries, and unique Mercury, erratic and indifferent ("vagum & indifferens"). In the microcosm, the human head has seven openings: two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and one mouth. He also noted that there are seven days in the week, seven metals, etc. Given all these corresponding sets of seven, there was clearly no place for the extra planets that Galileo had claimed to have discovered. So they do not exist.


Outline of Earth sciences

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Earth science:
Earth science – all-embracing term for the sciences related to the planet Earth. It is also known as geoscience, the geosciences or the Earth sciences, and is arguably a special case in planetary science, the Earth being the only known life-bearing planet.
Earth science is a branch of the physical sciences which is a part of the natural sciences. It in turn has many branches.
Earth's spheres.
Ecosphere – there are many subsystems that make up the natural environment (the planetary ecosystem or "ecosphere") of the Earth. Many of the subsystems are characterized as "spheres", coinciding with the shape of the planet. The four spheres (for which most of the other spheres are a subtype of) are the atmosphere, the biosphere, the hydrosphere and the geosphere. Listed roughly from outermost to innermost the named spheres of the Earth are:
Branches of Earth science.
Atmospheric science.
Atmospheric sciences – The study of the atmosphere, its processes, and interactions with other systems
Geography.
Geography – The science that studies the terrestrial surface, the societies that inhabit it and the territories, landscapes, places or regions that form it.
Oceanography.
Oceanography – The study of the physical and biological aspects of the ocean
Planetary science.
Planetary science – The study of planets (including Earth), moons, and planetary systems (in particular those of the Solar System) and the processes that form them.
History of Earth science.
History of Earth science – history of the all-embracing sciences related to the planet Earth. Earth science, and all of its branches, are branches of physical science.


Gottfried Heinsius

Gottfried Heinsius (April, 1709 – May 21, 1769) was a German mathematician, geographer and astronomer.
He was born near Naumburg and was awarded a Ph.D. in 1733 from the University of Leipzig with a dissertation on "De viribus motricibus". Later he became professor of mathematics at the same institution. Professor Heinsius may have been the first to publish an announcement about the return of Halley's comet in 1759. From 1736–43 he taught in St. Petersburg with Leonhard Euler and was a member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. He died in Leipzig.
The crater Heinsius on the Moon is named after him.


William Devonshire Saull

William Devonshire Saull (21 April 1783 – 26 April 1855) was an English businessman, known now for his activities as geologist, antiquary and museum-keeper, philanthropist and supporter of radical causes.
Life.
Saull was born at Byfield, Northamptonshire on 21 April 1783, the son of William Saul and Elizabeth Devonshire. He married Elizabeth Weedon in 1808. He was a wine merchant of the firm of Saull & Saddington. He was in business at 19 Aldersgate Street, London, and then moved a few doors to 15 Aldersgate Street which also was his residence, around 1830.
Collector.
Saull accumulated at 15 Aldersgate Street a large geological collection, together with some antiquities, mostly from London. It was described by John Timbs in 1855:
[...] a private collection, which the proprietor liberally allows to be inspected on Thursdays, from 11 A.M. The Antiquities, principally excavated in the metropolis, consist of early British vases, Roman lamps and urns, amphora, and dishes, tiles, bricks, and pavements, and fragments of Samian ware; also, a few Egyptian antiquities: and a cabinet of Greek, Roman, and early British coins. The Geological Department contains the collection of the late Mr. Sowerby, with additions by Mr. Saull, F.G.S.; together exceeding 20,000 specimens, arranged according to the probable order of the earth's structure. Every article bears a descriptive label: and the localisation of the antiquities, some of which were dug up almost on the spot, renders these relics so many medals of our metropolitan civilisation.
Saull began to swap fossils with Gideon Mantell, a fellow collector, in 1830. In 1831 he purchased the geological collection of James Sowerby, previously on display in Lambeth; in 1833 he made it known that the weekly viewing time for his collection was open to working people, and in 1835 he rebuilt his museum.
Among Saull's exhibits was the sacrum of "Iguanodon", mentioned by Richard Owen in one of his "Reports on British Reptile Fossils". This specimen originated in the Isle of Wight, and is now in the Natural History Museum; the significance of the fused vertebrae with it came to Owen after his 1841 BAAS talk in Plymouth. It was a key step in postulating the "Dinosauria". In fact Owen reviewed numerous specimens in 1842, of which those held by George Bax Holmes and Saull were the prominent examples in private hands; the sacrum has been called a "major factor" in erecting "Dinosauria", and has been regarded as the first true dinosaur specimen.
Activist.
Saull's interests in radical causes were broad. He spoke at the "Optimist Chapel" of Pierre Henri Joseph Baume, around 1830. He was a backer of the unconventional ministries of Rev. Robert Taylor and Rev. Josiah Fitch of Stepney; and he also supported, with Julian Hibbert, Richard Carlile's lease of the Surrey Rotunda; he lectured himself at the Rotunda in 1832. He was nominated in 1832 to the National Political Union, a reformist group, by Henry Revell; George Jacob Holyoake relates that when Hibbert died, he had charged Baume with getting his head to Saull and his museum, for phrenological purposes.
Saull was close to the group around Robert Owen, serving on the council of the Owenite Equitable Labour Exchange, also in 1832; and he spoke in 1833 at an Owenite meeting in Charlotte Street, in favour of liberalisation of divorce. He addressed Owenites at Bristol in 1833 and put forth the theory of man's evolution from monkeys or apes, an idea he derived from Sir Humphry Davy. This "simian hypothesis" was inconsistent with the editorial line of "The Crisis" where it was published in October 1833, which came down against the antiquity of man and human speciation.
At the end of 1833 Saull was one of a group who employed William James Linton to fit out a room in City Road as a "Hall of Science", in which Rowland Detrosier was to lecture. The following year the Hall was active, controlled by James Watson, and Saull associated there with Watson, John Gast, and other "Finsbury group" radicals. When in the 1830s the government successfully prosecuted Henry Hetherington, who had evaded the stamp duty on newspapers, Saull acted as treasurer of a "Victim Fund" for those pursued for selling unstamped papers; the fund was an 1831 initiative of Hibbert and Saull with John Cleave and William Lovett, backed by the National Union of the Working Classes.
Saull joined a London Anti-Corn Law Association in 1836. In 1844, to support the faltering Owenite movement, he took a mortgage on the Rosehill (or Rose Hill) property that was part of one of its utopian schemes. This was part of a scheme of retrenchment implemented by William Pare, after the Harmony Hall estate in Hampshire had over-extended its finances, taking in Rosehill and another farm; Owen himself settled at Rosehill. He also supported the John Street Institution, a London centre for Chartism, by contributing to building costs.
Member of learned societies.
Saull was elected Fellow of the Geological Society in 1831, and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1841; he was also a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society., and a member of other societies, including the Société Géologique de France, and the London Phrenological Society. He was on the Council of the Ethnological Society of London in 1850.
Death and legacy.
Saull died on 26 April 1855, and was buried in Kensal Green cemetery, near the graves of his radical friends Henry Hetherington and Allen Davenport. He had purchased a plot there in 1849, announced in "The Reasoner" for 12 September that year, shortly after Hetherington's death; the ground was unconsecrated. He is also listed on the Reformers Memorial near the entrance to Kensal Green Cemetery.
Saull's collections passed to the Metropolitan Institution, located in Cleveland Street, London, and managed by the trustees of his estate. They were never unpacked there, however. In the end the British Museum purchased around 200 objects, in 1863. The bulk of the collection was taken, questionably, by John Calvert.
Cleveland Hall in Cleveland Street was built with a legacy from William Devonshire Saull, and in 1861 replaced the John Street Institution as the London center of freethought.
The hall was controlled by its shareholders, and these changed over time, so it was not always used for freethought purposes. Eventually it was acquired by Hugh Price Hughes for his West London Methodist Mission.
Works and views.
Saull wrote a tract in the form of a letter to a local vicar (1828), arguing from comparative mythology. His interest in palaeontology was connected to his opposition to religious theories of creation; it has been said that "in Saull's case Deism was a mask for materialism". In writing to "The Mechanics' Magazine" edited by Sholto Percy in 1833, conveying the opening of his collection to visitors, he ended with the thought:
Education is the most important of sciences; and in practice we must necessarily divest our minds from every prejudice which has hitherto trammelled and prostrated the minds of youth.
Saull read papers to the Geological Society in 1849, and to the Society of Antiquaries in 1841, 1842, and 1844. His essays on coupled astronomical and geological phenomena (published in 1836 and 1853) contain his own very original opinions. Gideon Mantell defined Saull's topic in the 1853 version "Essay on the Connexion between Astronomical and Geological Phenomena" as "hypothetical causes of conditions and changes of temperature in former periods of the earth's history". Saull also republished, adding a preface, "An Essay on the Astronomical and Physical Causes of Geological Changes", by Sir Richard Phillips, attacking the Newtonian theory of gravitation. It was answered by Sampson Arnold Mackey in a "Lecture on Astronomy" (1832). His scientific views were discussed at some length by William Floyd Karkeek, writing on "The Geological History of the Horse" in "The Veterinarian" in 1841. His stratigraphy was based on granite as fundamental, from which coral might generate spontaneously. He believed in evolution based on changing physical conditions on earth, over a very long timescale.
Subsequently, Saull took an interest in archaeology. His "Notitia Britanniae" appeared in 1845, a year in which he examined the London strata to about 20 feet deep, in an excavation in Cheapside, comparing pre-Roman dwellings to some he had seen in Yorkshire. He gave a paper at the Ethnological Society (15 March 1848) about the Roman fort on Wimbledon Common, in terms of a five-stage conjectural history of ancient Britons. In 1851 in Ipswich he addressed the BAAS on "Ethnology and Archaeology of the Norse and Saxons, in reference to Britain"; the paper was not published.


Maurice Key

(John) Maurice Key (born 4 June 1905; died 21 December 1984) was the Anglican Bishop of Sherborne then Truro in the third quarter of the 20th century.
He was educated at Rossall School and Pembroke College, Cambridge and ordained in 1928. Beginning his ministry with a curacy at "St Mary’s Portsea" he was successively Vicar of Aylesbeare, Rector of Newton Abbot and finally (before his elevation to the Episcopate) Rural Dean of the Three Towns.
Key failed to take action or to launch an investigation into Jeremy Dowling, (later Dowling was convicted of sex offenses against boys). A review found, “There is no doubt that there were a number of missed opportunities for the diocese of Truro to undertake its own investigations into the allegations made in 1972 against Jeremy Dowling.” The review also stated, “No institution or organisation should have relied on a police criminal investigation to make judgments on the conduct of those it employs or engages with. It has its own responsibilities to judge such behaviour. These judgments are not tied to the criminal standard but to the civil standard, ie ‘are events more likely than not to have happened’ or ‘on the balance of probabilities’.”
He was the father of Robert Key, a politician.


Hanlu

The traditional Chinese calendar divides a year into 24 solar terms (節氣). Hánlù, "Kanro", "Hallo", or "Hàn lộ" () is the 17th solar term. It begins when the Sun reaches the celestial longitude of 195° and ends when it reaches the longitude of 210°. It more often refers in particular to the day when the Sun is exactly at the celestial longitude of 195°. In the Gregorian calendar, it usually begins around October 8 and ends around October 23.


Gros Horloge

The Gros-Horloge () is a fourteenth-century astronomical clock in Rouen, Normandy.
The clock is installed in a Renaissance arch crossing the Rue du Gros-Horloge. The mechanism is one of the oldest in France, the movement having been made in 1389. Construction of the clock was started by Jourdain del Leche who lacked the necessary expertise to finish the task, so the work was completed by Jean de Felain, who became the first to hold the position of governor of the clock.
The clock was originally constructed without a dial, with one revolution of the hour-hand representing twenty-four hours. The movement is cast in wrought iron, and at approximately twice the size of the Wells Cathedral clock, it is perhaps the largest such mechanism still extant. A facade was added in 1529 when the clock was moved to its current position. The mechanism was electrified in the 1920s and it was restored in 1997.
The Renaissance facade represents a golden sun with 24 rays on a starry blue background. The dial measures 2.5 metres in diameter. The phases of the moon are shown in the oculus of the upper part of the dial. It completes a full rotation in 29 days. The week days are shown in an opening at the base of the dial with allegorical subjects for each day of the week.
The Gros Horloge has featured in paintings by J. M. W. Turner and the French impressionist .