Home
About The Club
Club News
How to Join
This Months Sky Guide
Observing Sessions
Meetings Timetable
The Whirlpool Starparty
Gallery
Weekly Newspaper Article
The Committee
Links
Messageboard
| |
WEEKLY NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
Each week the limerick leader newspaper
publishes an article written by Shannonside astronomy club.
Here is this weeks article:
Irish Astronomers
For a small island, Ireland has contributed more than its fair share to the
scientific discoveries of the past three centuries. The first extant report of
an Irishman embroiled with medieval church authorities about scientific matters
concerns St. Vergilius (Fergal), who ministered as a priest in Bavaria in the
Eighth Century and was attacked by a fellow churchman for heresy. Vergilius had
proposed that the Earth was a sphere and that people could live in the antipodes
without falling off! The controversy is somehow reminiscent of Galileo’s
confrontation with church authorities over other radical scientific ideas,
centuries later. Vergilius appears to have escaped unharmed in body and
reputation, as he was later made bishop of Salzburg.
Though born in Copenhagen in 1852, John Dreyer lived in Ireland for many years
and worked as assistant to Lawrence Parsons, the Fourth Earl of Rosse, whose
father built the great 72-inch telescope, ‘The Leviathan of Parsonstown’.
Parsons, though eclipsed by his famous father, conducted significant studies of
his own, including determining the temperature of the Moon’s surface, in which
he was assisted by the young Dreyer. Dreyer’s major achievement was the
compilation of the New General Catalogue of stars (NGC), mostly based on the
observations of astronomer Sir William Herschel. He expanded the original
catalogue of nearly 8,000 stars with a supplementary catalogue of another 5,000
stars. The NGC remains a key reference for astronomers to this day.
Sir Howard Grubb, born in 1844, inherited his father’s telescope design and
manufacturing business in Dublin and made many very fine instruments to grace
some of the world’s finest observatories. Specialising in refractor and
reflector telescope designs, he made a 10-inch refractor for Armagh Observatory
in 1882 and a massive 28-inch refractor for Greenwich Observatory in 1893.
One of the great astronomers of the Nineteenth Century was Sir William Parsons,
Third Earl of Ross. On the grounds of his demesne in Birr, Co Offaly, he
constructed the world’s first 72-inch telescope. In the age of steam, he had
to conceive, plan and execute a project that required the construction of a
massive telescope, including its huge mirror and support systems, all of which
had to work together with a jeweller’s precision. His determination paid off
when his telescope gave him unparalleled views of stars, planets, nebulae and
galaxies. His telescope was unrivalled for seventy years.
Born in 1943, Jocelyn Bell-Burnell began her interest in astronomy early through
her father, who was architect of Armagh Planetarium, near their home. In the
1960s, she became involved in research into quasars, recently discovered and
very bright distant galaxies. Bell-Burnell, while working on her PhD thesis in
1967, discovered and identified the first pulsar, a rapidly rotating, extremely
dense remnant of a supernova explosion. Its radio pulse was so regular it seemed
artificial, so it was dubbed ‘Little Green Man 1’. Although controversially,
she didn’t get the Nobel Prize for her discovery, Bell-Burnell is honoured
worldwide for her achievements.
Clear Skies!
PREVIOUS ARTICLES:
126
Irish Astronomers
125
Galaxies
125b
Total Lunar Eclipse 20/21 Feb 2008
(special
feature)
124
The return to Mercury
123
February Nights Sky
122
The Gas Giants
121
Permanence?
120
At the Edge
119
Jan Night Sky
118
Stellar Evolution
117
Romancing the stars
116
Newgrange
-The cycles of change
115 Mars
Revealed
114 Decembers
Sky
113
Star
colours
112 Comet Holmes surprises
111 Celestial North
110 Little Green Men
|
