The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Jones, Harold Spencer

Born Mar. 29, 1890, in London; died there Nov. 3, 1960. British astronomer.

Jones was her majesty’s astronomer at the astronomical observatory at the Cape of Good Hope from 1923 to 1933 and astronomer royal at the Royal Observatory of Greenwich from 1933. He was president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1937 to 1939 and of the International Astronomical Union from 1945 to 1948. Jones investigated the motions of the moon and Mars and the irregularity of the rotation of the earth. He refined the values of the solar parallax as well as of the constants of aberration of light and nutation.

WORKS

“The Solar Parallax and Mass of the Moon From Observations of Eros at the Opposition of 1931.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1941, vol. 101, no. 8.
In Russian translation:
Zhizhn’ na drugikh mirakh. Moscow-Leningrad, 1946.

References in periodicals archive

Distinguished present and future knights at these functions included the likes of Sir Arthur Eddington, Sir Edward Appleton, Sir William Bragg (a Nobel prize winner), Sir Frank Dyson (BAA President 1916-1918), Sir Harold Spencer Jones (BAA President 1934-1936, and knighted in 1943) and Sir Richard Gregory.

Alfred Parr in the chair, the members were able to listen to Dr Harold Spencer Jones, the Astronomer Royal, deliver a lecture about work being carried out at The Cape Observatory, to deter mine the solar parallax and the mass of the Moon from observations of the close passage of asteroid (433) Eros in 1931.

At the restaurant, immediately following the meeting, (16) the official guests were Dr Harold Spencer Jones and his wife, Sir William H.

Both the present and past Astronomers Royal attended (Dr Harold Spencer Jones and his predecessor Sir Frank Dyson) as well as Prof F.

(24) The President, Dr Harold Spencer Jones, was again in the chair.

The BAA Annual Dinners of the 1930s

All of them, from the Roman engineering expert Sextus Julius Frontinus, who said 2,000 years ago that everything useful had already been invented, to Astronomer Royal Sir Harold Spencer Jones, who, in 1957, dismissed the idea of space flight as "bunk" - a fortnight before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1.

Cassandra: In my expert opinion.

Fourteen observatories in nine countries took part under the leadership of the English astronomer Harold Spencer Jones (1890-1960).

Distance of the sun

There is a curious sentence appearing in the later editions of General Astronomy by Sir Harold Spencer Jones (it does not occur in the first edition of 1922).

Maximum elongations for Mercury & Venus

Africa where it would be more useful than in England.' (9) It is all the more surprising then, that Dyson's successor, Harold Spencer Jones, acquiesced in a decision to site a 98-inch telescope near the south coast of England and, as we shall see, remained firmly opposed to locating the INT overseas.

Work of this type, which was continued under Christie's successors, Frank Dyson and Harold Spencer Jones, demanded larger telescopes and also darker and clearer skies than were available in east London.

RGO 9: Papers of Harold Spencer Jones. RGO 10: Papers of Sir Richard Woolley.

The origins and construction of the Isaac Newton Telescope, Herstmonceux, 1944-1967