Richard Anthony Proctor

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Richard Anthony Proctor (ca.1870)
Richard Anthony Proctor

Richard Anthony Proctor (born March 23, 1837 in Chelsea (London) , † September 12, 1888 in New York City ) was an English astronomer and author of popular science works. He made one of the first maps of the planet Mars .

Life

Proctor was a sickly child. When his father died in 1850, his mother first taught him at home. His health improved over the years and he was able to attend Kings College London and later St John's College . He then studied at Cambridge University , where he graduated in 1860. He married during his studies. The marriage produced a daughter.

Proctor turned to astronomy and in 1865 published an article in Cornhill Magazine on the colors of binary stars . In the same year his first book Saturn and its System appeared , which he edited at his own expense. Although the extensive work was well received by astronomers, it was not sold too often. This was followed by treatises on Mars , Jupiter , the sun , moon , comets , meteors , stars, and foggy objects.

Proctor supported his family with his literary work. Since he had to realize that a more scientific work, like Saturn and its System , was not getting a big market, he adopted a more popular writing style. He wrote for several magazines and achieved a high profile. His numerous works made a large readership familiar with the basics of astronomy.

However, his 1866 Handbook of the Stars was rejected by publishers. Proctor also had this book printed himself; it sold pretty well. For his Half-Hours with the Telescope (1868), which had 20 editions, he received only £ 25 from the publisher. Although he was not a teacher, Proctor taught math at times to supplement his income.

His literary reputation continued to grow, and he wrote regularly for The Intellectual Observer , Chambers Journal, and Popular Science Review . In 1870 his Other Worlds than Ours appeared , in which he described the possibility of other inhabited worlds. In it he took - with reference to an anonymous writing - reflections on space and time from Felix Eberty , his work Die Gestirne und die Weltgeschichte. Thoughts about space, time and eternity. Published in English in 1846 without naming an author.

In 1881 he founded the general scientific magazine Knowledge , which initially appeared weekly and from 1885 monthly, and was widely distributed. He wrote articles for the American Cyclopaedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica . In 1866 he was accepted into the Royal Astronomical Society .

Proctor dealt with the distribution of stars, star clusters and nebulae as well as the structure of the universe . He became an expert at making maps and published two star atlases . A map that contained all the stars of the Bonn survey (up to the 10th magnitude ) showed the distribution of the stars in the northern sky.

Proctor's Martian map (from: Other Worlds than Ours , 4th ed. 1905)

Proctor used old drawings of Mars dating back to 1666 to determine the period of rotation of the planet. In 1873 he gave the Martian day as 24h 37m 22.713s - this corresponds very precisely to the current value of 24h 37m 22.663s. He made a map of Mars based on 27 drawings by the astronomer William Rutter Dawes . The map was later superseded by the works of Giovanni Schiaparelli and Eugène Antoniadi and Proctor's designations of the geographical features were not adopted (e.g. his "Kaiser Sea", which he named after the astronomer Frederik Kaiser , is now known as the Great Syrte ) .

In 1881 Proctor married for the second time and moved to the United States . He died in New York in 1888. He could no longer complete his most extensive work, Old and New Astronomy . It was completed by A. Cowper Ranyard and published in 1892. His first marriage daughter, Mary Proctor , also became an astronomer and successful writer.

Richard A. Proctor, who had died of yellow fever in Willard Parker Hospital, Manhattan , was provisionally buried in a grave made available by Reverend Stephen Merritt (1833-1917) in Maple Grove Cemetery in Kew Gardens, New York City. He found his final resting place in 1893 in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn , where George W. Childs , a well-known publisher from Philadelphia, had a magnificent grave monument erected for him. Proctor's daughter Mary also attended the reburial ceremony.

An impact crater on Mars was named in Proctor's memory .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Richard A. Proctor: Other worlds than ours: the plurality of worlds studied under the light of recent scientific researches . Longmans, Green, London 1870 ( hdl: 2027 / chi.57121156 )
  2. Felix Eberty: The stars and the world history. Thoughts about space, time and eternity. Edited by Gregorius Itelson. Rogoff, Berlin 1923. S. IX
  3. Felix Eberty : The stars and the world history. Thoughts about space, time and eternity. With a foreword by Albert Einstein . Edited by Werner Graf. Comino, Berlin 2014, eBook ISBN 978-3-945831-01-4
  4. The Stars and the Earth; Thoughts upon Space, Time and Eternity. Balliere Publisher, London 1846
  5. a b R.A. Proctor's Body at rest . (PDF) In: The New York Times , October 4, 1893, p. 9.
  6. Stephen Merritt (1833–1917) ( Memento of the original from September 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.maplegrove.biz
  7. Maple Grove Cemetery
  8. Childs, George William . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 6 : Châtelet - Constantine . London 1910, p. 141 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).