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Nevil Maskelyne

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Maskelyne, Nevil 

Born Oct. 6, 1732, in London; died Feb. 9, 1811, in Greenwich. English astronomer.

Maskelyne graduated from Cambridge University in 1754. Beginning in 1765 he was director of the Greenwich Observatory. Maskelyne conducted observations of stars, the sun, and the planets; he also studied the moon for the purpose of determining longitudes. He selected 36 bright stars, now called Maskelyne stars, in order to relate observations of the stars to observations of the sun and planets. In 1766 he founded the English astronomical yearbook Nautical Almanac. In 1774, Maskelyne attempted to determine the density of the earth.

WORKS

Tables for Computing the Apparent Places of the Fixt Stars and Reducing Observations of the Planets. London, 1774.


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The first person to note it was a British stage musician named Nevil Maskelyne.
And resplendent in top hat and tails is John Nevil Maskelyne, the West End magician of the 1870s who took it upon himself to show how easy it was to fake spirit activity in a murky light, as long as you had bendy wrists and a stooge crouched under the table.
I was also pleased to see a reference to David Cartwright's wonderful 1969 study of the tides at the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, 208 years after Charles Mason (of Mason-Dixon fame) assisted Nevil Maskelyne in measuring sea level changes there; the project compensated for the cloudiness that prevented them from achieving their primary objective of observing the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun.
 
 
 
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