John Flamsteed

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Richard Fuerst

Mr. Percival

DE Astronomy

14 October 2011

John Flamsteed

            John Flamsteed was born in Denby, England, 19 August 1946 to Stephen and Mary Flamsteed. His father was a prosperous businessman who abhorred John's desire to be an astronomer. Additionally, John's mother and stepmother both died early on in the young astronomer's childhood. Coupled with a serious rheumatic condition at age 14 and frequent incapacitation,  John's father denied his sickly son the chance to attend university in 1662. The father's decision turned out to be a mixed blessing for John Flamsteed as he was left to his own interests, namely the stars above.

            John made his debut into the field of astronomy in 1669 when he anonymously submitted his lunar occultations for 1670. This would lead to his meeting with Sir Jonas Moore, a man with connections to the King Charles II. Together the two astronomers would convince the king that there was a strong need for accurate measurements of celestial objects for navigation; afterwards the king would setup an observatory in Greenwich and designate John Flamsteed as "Astronomer Royal". In 1684 he was granted a place to stay in Surrey, which was not far from Greenwich, and later in 1692 he would marry a lovely lady by the name of Margaret Cooke. From his new

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position, Flamsteed decided to rectify the tables of the motions of the heavens, a feat originally taken on by Tycho Brahe a century earlier. With his data he constructed three different tables: one supported Horrox's lunar theory, Doctrine of the Sphere (1680) which came close to predicting the sun's true eccentricity values of .01675, and Whiston's Praelectiones astronomicae (1707). All these represent Flamsteed's refusal for his predecessor's inaccuracies and his adoption of more modern astrological ideas. In the years following 1689, Flamsteed achieved the precise latitude of Greenwich (51° 28' 38"), the obliquity of the ecliptic, the position of the equinox, and then the method he used to observe absolute right ascensions. Using matched occasions at which the sun had identical meridian altitudes near each equinox, he measured the time intervals between the passage of the sun and a bright star across the meridian. Halving the difference between the two time intervals then located the solstice and gave the star’s right ascension. He used this method to determine the positions of forty stars that he would use as references, Flamsteed found the rest of his 3,000-star catalog from readings he had taken previously with a sextant.

            John's accurate fundamental astronomy would not go by unnoticed and beginning in 1704 there were two famous astronomers who wanted more than anything to pry the unverified observations from John Flamsteed, Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley. Eventually the two cohorts managed to publish a pirated version of John's observations in 1712. Later in 1714 John was able to have the pirated version burned except for seventy-nine pages. Unfortunately he died in Greenwich on Dec.31,1719 and he never got to see his work get published; however, his wife

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managed to see his work released in Historia Coelestis Britannica (1725) and in its companion Atlas coelestis (1729). Despite a rough childhood, crippling health problems, and the animosity of his colleagues, John Flamsteed managed to accomplish a great deal for the field of astronomy through his meticulous industry and phenomenal mathematical ability.