Edmond Halley

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Related to Edmond Halley: Charles Messier, John Flamsteed

Halley, Edmond

(hăl`ē, hô`lē), 1656–1742, English astronomer and mathematician. He is particularly noted as the first astronomer to predict the return of a comet and the first to point out the use of a transit of Venus in determining the parallax of the sun. In 1676 he went to St. Helena to observe the southern skies and as a result made a catalog of 341 stars of the Southern Hemisphere. In 1677 he made the first complete observation of a transit of Mercury. He financed the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia and helped to prepare it for the press. On the basis of Newton's theory, Halley calculated the orbit of the great comet of 1682—since known as Halley's cometHalley's comet
or Comet Halley
, periodic comet named for Edmond Halley, who observed it in 1682 and identified it as the one observed in 1531 and 1607. Halley did not live to see its return in 1758, close to the time he predicted.
..... Click the link for more information. —and predicted its return in 1758. In 1698–1700 he made one of the first studies of compass variations in the North Atlantic. He was made astronomer royal in 1720. He observed the moon through the complete revolution of its nodes; this took 18 years. Other discoveries of Halley's are the proper motions of the stars and the acceleration of the moon's mean motion. His noted synopsis of known comets appeared in 1705; his Tabulae astronomicae (1749, tr. 1752) was published posthumously.

Bibliography

See his Correspondence and Papers (repr. 1975); biography by C. A. Ronan (1970); L. Baldwin, Edmond Halley and His Comet (1985).

Halley, Edmond

(1656–1742) British mathematician and astronomer; calculated orbit of comet named after him. [Br. Hist.: EB, IV: 860]

See: Astronomy

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References in periodicals archive ?

The film concludes by examining the professional relationship between Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley, who were inspired by the work of Galileo and Kepler.

The Moving Earth

He in turn appointed scientist and astronomer Edmond Halley, who lent his name to the famous comet, to oversee the mint at Chester Castle.

When Chester was the coin capital of Canute's kingdom; 1,000-year-old penny minted in North West goes under hammer

No systematic astronomical observations of the far southern skies were made, however, until the English astronomer Edmond Halley (1656-1742) traveled to the island of St.

Southern stars

You look up and see Halley's Comet--through a pair of binoculars, perhaps--and you are looking at the same comet (or very nearly the same comet: the nucleus has lost many meters of ice since the perihelion passage of 1682) that Edmond Halley saw the summer after he and Mary Tooke were first wed.

A mote of dust

For example, a page on comets includes a picture and brief biography of Edmond Halley, a picture of Comet Hale-Bopp, a drawing of comet orbits, and a description of what a comet is.

E. Encyclopedia Science

Our received narrative dwells upon a single extended episode, namely, the public rows that Flamsteed, Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley had in the early eighteenth century over the ownership and publication of the Astronomer Royal's star charts and data, with Newton's victory (by definition) being "A Good Thing for Science.

Flamsteed's Stars: New Perspectives on the Life and Work of the First Astronomer Royal (1646-1719)

The first prediction of the track of totality across the Earth's surface was made by Edmond Halley (after whom the famous comet is named) who predicted with considerable accuracy the track across England of an eclipse in 1715.

ECLIPSE FACTS

It was maritime history's least likely Blackbeard -- Edmond Halley, FRS.

Edmond Halley - explorer

Edmond Halley got excited about comets in 1682, when a spectacular one blazed over Britain.

Halley's Comet is coming

Edmond Halley made a famous map for the total solar eclipse of May 3, 1715.

The evolving eclipse map: nearly 400 years of fine-tuning have turned today's eclipse maps into works of art that predict cosmic alignments with exquisite precision

In 1716, Edmond Halley, of Halley's comet fame, noted that the rare transit of Venus could be used to determine the Earth-sun distance--if observers fanned out over the globe to record the event.

Shades of Venus: our neighbor in the solar system holds a lantern on faraway planets

Anniversaries: 60th: Austria was declared to be part of the German Reich and renamed "Ostmark"; 70th: St Francis Dam near Los Angeles burst flooding countryside and killing 450 people; 240th: Halley's Comet came to its perihelion as predicted by the astronomer Edmond Halley in 1682.