The speakers and organisers – Lee Macdonald, Mike Frost, Jeremy Shears, Bob Marriott, Simon Mitton and Jacqueline Mitton (Jay Tate also spoke)On November 27th 2010, we held our first section meeting. We think it is probably the first ever Historical Section meeting!
In the morning session there were two talks:
Bob Marriott spoke about the life of Mary Evershed, the founder of the Historical Section and an eminent astronomer, author and historian in the early twentieth century.
Jeremy Shears then described the life of Felix de Roy, a charismatic Belgian newspaper editor who was Director of the BAA Variable Star Section from 1922 to 1939. Tragically, his life was cut short as a consequence of food shortages in Nazi-occupied Belgium during the Second World War.
During the lunch break, Lee Macdonald gave a guided tour of the historic 12-inch Northumberland refractor at the Cambridge University observatory.
Lee then gave the first formal talk of the afternoon session, on how the 98-inch Isaac Newton Telescope came to be built in the cloudy countryside of Sussex.
The meeting was deemed to be very enjoyable and it is hoped that it will be the first of many successful Historical Section meetings. Also in the afternoon session, Jay Tate described how a disused Schmidt telescope at Cambridge is being brought back to life at the Spaceguard Centre in the Welsh Marches in order to search for near-earth asteroids and comets.
Jacqueline Mitton then presented a fascinating biography of Maria (pronounced Mar-EYE-ah) Mitchell, the earliest woman professional astronomer in the United States, who started a tradition of female professors of astronomy at Vassar College that continues to this day.
Jacqueline’s husband Simon Mitton rounded off the day with a talk on the life and work of Sir Fred Hoyle, the colourful and often controversial twentieth-century astronomer, who discovered how chemical elements are formed in stars, propounded the “steady state” theory of cosmology and founded what is now the Institute of Astronomy.
A fascinating display of papers and photographs from the Hoyle Project was brought to the meeting by Katie Birkwood of St John’s College, Cambridge, of which Hoyle was a Fellow.
We had a display stand for the BAA; plus poster displays for the Society for the History of Astronomy and on “The Great Melbourne Telescope and Observational Astronomy”, “The ‘Catts Telescope’: A Forgotten Nineteenth Century 20-inch Grubb Refractor” and “Ronald McIntosh and the Role of the Amateur in New Zealand Amateur Astronomy” contributed by Wayne Orchiston from James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland.
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