Richard Anthony Proctor
Encyclopedia
Richard Anthony Proctor (23 March 1837 in Chelsea, London
– 12 September 1888) was an English
astronomer
.
He is best remembered for having produced one of the earliest maps of Mars
in 1867 from 27 drawings by the English observer William Rutter Dawes
.
His map was later superseded by those of Giovanni Schiaparelli
and Eugène Antoniadi and his nomenclature was dropped (for instance, his "Kaiser Sea" became Syrtis Major Planum).
He used old drawings of Mars dating back to 1666 to try to determine the sidereal day of Mars. His final estimate, in 1873, was 24h 37m 22.713s, reasonably close to the modern value of 24h 37m 22.663s. Nevertheless, Frederik Kaiser
's value of 24h 37m 22.622s is closer.
A crater
on Mars
is named after Proctor.
, and subsequently earned a scholarship at St John's College
, Cambridge
. He graduated in 1860 as 23rd wrangler. His marriage while still an undergraduate probably accounted for his low place in the tripos.
He then read for the bar, but turned to astronomy
and authorship instead, and in 1865 published an article on the Colors of Double Stars in the Cornhill Magazine
. His first book Saturn
and its System was published in the same year, at his own expense. This work contains an elaborate account of the phenomena presented by the planet; but although favorably received by astronomers, it had no great sale. He intended to follow it up with similar treatises on Mars
, Jupiter
, Sun
, Moon
, comet
s and meteor
s, star
s, and nebula
e, and had in fact commenced a monograph on Mars, when the failure of a New Zealand
bank deprived him of an independence which would have enabled him to carry out his scheme without anxiety as to its commercial success or failure.
Being thus obliged to depend upon his writings for the support of his family, and having learned by the fate of his Saturn and its System that the general public are not attracted by works requiring arduous study, he cultivated a more popular style. He wrote for a number of periodicals; and although he has stated that he would at this time willingly have turned to stone-breaking on the roads, or any other form of hard and honest but unscientific labor, if a modest competence had been offered him in any such direction, he attained a high degree of popularity, and his numerous works had a wide influence in familiarizing the public with the main facts of astronomy.
His earlier efforts were, however, not always successful. His Handbook of the Stars (1866) was refused by Messrs Longmans and Messrs Macmillan, but being privately printed, it sold fairly well. For his Half-Hours with the Telescope (1868), which eventually reached a 20th edition, he received originally £25 from Messrs Hardwick. Although teaching was uncongenial to him he took pupils in mathematics, and held for a time the position of mathematical coach for Woolwich and Sandhurst.
His literary standing meantime improved, and he became a regular contributor to The Intellectual Observer, Chambers Journal and the Popular Science Review. In 1870 appeared his Other Worlds Than Ours, in which he discussed the question of the plurality of worlds in the light of new facts. This was followed by a long series of popular treatises in rapid succession, amongst the more important of which are Light Science for Leisure Hours and The Sun (1871); The Orbs around Us and Essays on Astronomy (1872); The Expanse of Heaven, The Moon and The Borderland of Science (1873); The Universe and the Coming Transits and Transits of Venus (1874); Our Place among Infinities (1875); Myths and Marvels of Astronomy (1877); The Universe of Stars (1878); Flowers of the Sky (1879); The Poetry of Astronomy (1880); Easy Star Lessons and Familiar Science Studies (1882); Mysteries of Time and Space and The Great Pyramid (1883); The Universe of Suns (1884); The Seasons (1885); Other Suns than Ours and Half-Hours with the Stars (1887).
In 1881 he founded Knowledge, a popular weekly magazine of science (converted into a monthly in 1885), which had a considerable circulation. In it he wrote on a great variety of subjects, including chess and whist.
He was also the author of the articles on astronomy in the American Cyclopaedia and the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica
, and was well known as a popular lecturer on astronomy in England
, America
and Australia
.
Elected a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society
in 1866, he became honorary secretary in 1872, and contributed eighty-three separate papers to its Monthly Notices. Of these the more noteworthy dealt with the distribution of stars, star cluster
s and nebulae, and the construction of the sidereal universe. He was an expert in all that related to map-drawing, and published two star-atlases. A chart on an isographic projection, exhibiting all the stars contained in the Bonner Durchmusterung, was designed to show the laws according to which the stars down to the 9-10th magnitude are distributed over the northern heavens. His Theoretical Considerations respecting the Corona
(Monthly Notices, xxxi. 184, 254) also deserve mention, as well as his discussions of the rotation of Mars, by which be deduced its period with a probable error of 0.005. He also vigorously criticized the official arrangements for observing the transits of Venus
of 1874 and 1882.
His largest and most ambitious work, Old and New Astronomy, left unfinished at his death, was completed by Arthur Cowper Ranyard
and published in 1892. He settled in America some time after his second marriage in 1881, and died of yellow fever
at New York
on the 12th of September 1888. A monument was later erected in his memory. Mary Proctor
, his daughter by his first marriage, became an astronomer and a successful lecturer and writer.
Chelsea, London
Chelsea is an area of West London, England, bounded to the south by the River Thames, where its frontage runs from Chelsea Bridge along the Chelsea Embankment, Cheyne Walk, Lots Road and Chelsea Harbour. Its eastern boundary was once defined by the River Westbourne, which is now in a pipe above...
– 12 September 1888) was an English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
astronomer
Astronomer
An astronomer is a scientist who studies celestial bodies such as planets, stars and galaxies.Historically, astronomy was more concerned with the classification and description of phenomena in the sky, while astrophysics attempted to explain these phenomena and the differences between them using...
.
He is best remembered for having produced one of the earliest maps of Mars
Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...
in 1867 from 27 drawings by the English observer William Rutter Dawes
William Rutter Dawes
William Rutter Dawes was an English astronomer.Dawes was born in West Sussex, the son of William Dawes, also an astronomer, who travelled to the colony of New South Wales on the First Fleet in 1788....
.
His map was later superseded by those of Giovanni Schiaparelli
Giovanni Schiaparelli
Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli was an Italian astronomer and science historian. He studied at the University of Turin and Berlin Observatory. In 1859-1860 he worked in Pulkovo Observatory and then worked for over forty years at Brera Observatory...
and Eugène Antoniadi and his nomenclature was dropped (for instance, his "Kaiser Sea" became Syrtis Major Planum).
He used old drawings of Mars dating back to 1666 to try to determine the sidereal day of Mars. His final estimate, in 1873, was 24h 37m 22.713s, reasonably close to the modern value of 24h 37m 22.663s. Nevertheless, Frederik Kaiser
Frederik Kaiser
Frederik Kaiser was a Dutch astronomer.He was director of the Leiden Observatory from 1838 until his death....
's value of 24h 37m 22.622s is closer.
A crater
Impact crater
In the broadest sense, the term impact crater can be applied to any depression, natural or manmade, resulting from the high velocity impact of a projectile with a larger body...
on Mars
Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...
is named after Proctor.
Biography
He was a delicate child, and, his father dying in 1850, his mother attended herself to his education. On his health improving he was sent to King's College LondonKing's College London
King's College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. King's has a claim to being the third oldest university in England, having been founded by King George IV and the Duke of Wellington in 1829, and...
, and subsequently earned a scholarship at St John's College
St John's College, Cambridge
St John's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college's alumni include nine Nobel Prize winners, six Prime Ministers, three archbishops, at least two princes, and three Saints....
, Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
. He graduated in 1860 as 23rd wrangler. His marriage while still an undergraduate probably accounted for his low place in the tripos.
He then read for the bar, but turned to astronomy
Astronomy
Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...
and authorship instead, and in 1865 published an article on the Colors of Double Stars in the Cornhill Magazine
Cornhill Magazine
The Cornhill Magazine was a Victorian magazine and literary journal named after Cornhill Street in London.Cornhill was founded by George Murray Smith in 1860 and was published until 1975. It was a literary journal with a selection of articles on diverse subjects and serialisations of new novels...
. His first book Saturn
Saturn
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest planet in the Solar System, after Jupiter. Saturn is named after the Roman god Saturn, equated to the Greek Cronus , the Babylonian Ninurta and the Hindu Shani. Saturn's astronomical symbol represents the Roman god's sickle.Saturn,...
and its System was published in the same year, at his own expense. This work contains an elaborate account of the phenomena presented by the planet; but although favorably received by astronomers, it had no great sale. He intended to follow it up with similar treatises on Mars
Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...
, Jupiter
Jupiter
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System. It is a gas giant with mass one-thousandth that of the Sun but is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets in our Solar System combined. Jupiter is classified as a gas giant along with Saturn,...
, Sun
Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...
, Moon
Moon
The Moon is Earth's only known natural satellite,There are a number of near-Earth asteroids including 3753 Cruithne that are co-orbital with Earth: their orbits bring them close to Earth for periods of time but then alter in the long term . These are quasi-satellites and not true moons. For more...
, comet
Comet
A comet is an icy small Solar System body that, when close enough to the Sun, displays a visible coma and sometimes also a tail. These phenomena are both due to the effects of solar radiation and the solar wind upon the nucleus of the comet...
s and meteor
METEOR
METEOR is a metric for the evaluation of machine translation output. The metric is based on the harmonic mean of unigram precision and recall, with recall weighted higher than precision...
s, star
Star
A star is a massive, luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity. At the end of its lifetime, a star can also contain a proportion of degenerate matter. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, which is the source of most of the energy on Earth...
s, and nebula
Nebula
A nebula is an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen gas, helium gas and other ionized gases...
e, and had in fact commenced a monograph on Mars, when the failure of a New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...
bank deprived him of an independence which would have enabled him to carry out his scheme without anxiety as to its commercial success or failure.
Being thus obliged to depend upon his writings for the support of his family, and having learned by the fate of his Saturn and its System that the general public are not attracted by works requiring arduous study, he cultivated a more popular style. He wrote for a number of periodicals; and although he has stated that he would at this time willingly have turned to stone-breaking on the roads, or any other form of hard and honest but unscientific labor, if a modest competence had been offered him in any such direction, he attained a high degree of popularity, and his numerous works had a wide influence in familiarizing the public with the main facts of astronomy.
His earlier efforts were, however, not always successful. His Handbook of the Stars (1866) was refused by Messrs Longmans and Messrs Macmillan, but being privately printed, it sold fairly well. For his Half-Hours with the Telescope (1868), which eventually reached a 20th edition, he received originally £25 from Messrs Hardwick. Although teaching was uncongenial to him he took pupils in mathematics, and held for a time the position of mathematical coach for Woolwich and Sandhurst.
His literary standing meantime improved, and he became a regular contributor to The Intellectual Observer, Chambers Journal and the Popular Science Review. In 1870 appeared his Other Worlds Than Ours, in which he discussed the question of the plurality of worlds in the light of new facts. This was followed by a long series of popular treatises in rapid succession, amongst the more important of which are Light Science for Leisure Hours and The Sun (1871); The Orbs around Us and Essays on Astronomy (1872); The Expanse of Heaven, The Moon and The Borderland of Science (1873); The Universe and the Coming Transits and Transits of Venus (1874); Our Place among Infinities (1875); Myths and Marvels of Astronomy (1877); The Universe of Stars (1878); Flowers of the Sky (1879); The Poetry of Astronomy (1880); Easy Star Lessons and Familiar Science Studies (1882); Mysteries of Time and Space and The Great Pyramid (1883); The Universe of Suns (1884); The Seasons (1885); Other Suns than Ours and Half-Hours with the Stars (1887).
In 1881 he founded Knowledge, a popular weekly magazine of science (converted into a monthly in 1885), which had a considerable circulation. In it he wrote on a great variety of subjects, including chess and whist.
He was also the author of the articles on astronomy in the American Cyclopaedia and the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
, and was well known as a popular lecturer on astronomy in England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, America
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
.
Elected a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society
Royal Astronomical Society
The Royal Astronomical Society is a learned society that began as the Astronomical Society of London in 1820 to support astronomical research . It became the Royal Astronomical Society in 1831 on receiving its Royal Charter from William IV...
in 1866, he became honorary secretary in 1872, and contributed eighty-three separate papers to its Monthly Notices. Of these the more noteworthy dealt with the distribution of stars, star cluster
Star cluster
Star clusters or star clouds are groups of stars. Two types of star clusters can be distinguished: globular clusters are tight groups of hundreds of thousands of very old stars which are gravitationally bound, while open clusters, more loosely clustered groups of stars, generally contain less than...
s and nebulae, and the construction of the sidereal universe. He was an expert in all that related to map-drawing, and published two star-atlases. A chart on an isographic projection, exhibiting all the stars contained in the Bonner Durchmusterung, was designed to show the laws according to which the stars down to the 9-10th magnitude are distributed over the northern heavens. His Theoretical Considerations respecting the Corona
Corona
A corona is a type of plasma "atmosphere" of the Sun or other celestial body, extending millions of kilometers into space, most easily seen during a total solar eclipse, but also observable in a coronagraph...
(Monthly Notices, xxxi. 184, 254) also deserve mention, as well as his discussions of the rotation of Mars, by which be deduced its period with a probable error of 0.005. He also vigorously criticized the official arrangements for observing the transits of Venus
Transit of Venus
A transit of Venus across the Sun takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and Earth, becoming visible against the solar disk. During a transit, Venus can be seen from Earth as a small black disk moving across the face of the Sun...
of 1874 and 1882.
His largest and most ambitious work, Old and New Astronomy, left unfinished at his death, was completed by Arthur Cowper Ranyard
Arthur Cowper Ranyard
-Life:Born at Swanscombe, Kent, he was son of Benjamin Ranyard by his wife Ellen Henrietta Ranyard . Ranyard attended University College School, London, from 1857 to 1860, afterwards proceeding to University College...
and published in 1892. He settled in America some time after his second marriage in 1881, and died of yellow fever
Yellow fever
Yellow fever is an acute viral hemorrhagic disease. The virus is a 40 to 50 nm enveloped RNA virus with positive sense of the Flaviviridae family....
at New York
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
on the 12th of September 1888. A monument was later erected in his memory. Mary Proctor
Mary Proctor
Mary Proctor was an American popularizer of astronomy.She was born in Dublin, Ireland, the daughter of Mary and Richard Proctor. They emigrated to the United States in 1882. Her father was a British popularizer of astronomy, and she gained her knowledge of the subject from him...
, his daughter by his first marriage, became an astronomer and a successful lecturer and writer.