|
ASTRONOMY ( HERCHEL) The Lecture
Born 17 May 1836 at Rugby, died 16 August 1920 at Sidmouth. Dr George Wilkin Norman Lockyer worked much of his life as a clerk at the War Office and was a self-trained astronomer. He was asked by the British Association to undertake a mapping of the Moon and then turned his attention to the Sun. He commenced spectral observations of the Sun and was able to determine the composition of its atmosphere, including the discovery of the element helium some 27 years before it was identified on Earth. In 1868 he was able to announce the nature of solar prominences and, by Doppler considerations estimated accurately the wind speed of a solar flare. Lockyer determined the temperature of the solar surface and of sunspots. He directed eight expeditions to observe total solar eclipses between 1870 and 1905. He was among the first to apply such techniques to astronomical study and is regarded as one of the founders of astro-physics. Lockyer was convinced that solar activity had an affect on the world's weather and climatic changes. He realised that the Earth's orbit lay at the edge of the solar corona. Much of his work from 1868, including that at South Kensington, lay in obtaining weather and climatic data from across the world to be collated with his observations of the Sun. He thought that the number and size of sunspots was related to the amount of rainfall on Earth. Norman Lockyer founded the scientific journal "Nature" in 1869, and was its editor for more than fifty years. Most would agree that this journal is his greatest gift to science. He advocated international co-operation and exchange of information between scientists. He campaigned for better science education and played a prominent role in introducing chemistry and physics to the curriculum of secondary schools in England and Wales. He set up an exhibition of science instruments at the Victoria and Albert Museum and later the site of his Solar Physics Observatory was, in part, used for the building of the Science Museum. In 1885 he became the world's first professor of astronomical physics at the Royal College of Science, South Kensington, now part of Imperial College. At the college, the Solar Physics Observatory was built for him and here he directed research until 1913. The work was extended to the brighter stars and he was able to classify these by
spectral type and arrange stars in order of rising and falling temperatures. Thus he was a major contributor to the observational base on which the theory of stellar evolution was developed in the 1920s. In his later life Lockyer established the astronomical significance of archaeological sites such as the pyramids, Karnac and Stonehenge. He is regarded as the father of the science astro-archaeology. Lockyer advocated that an Observatory should be built on a hill top in a rural location where skies were dark. The government of the day decided that the Solar Physics Observatory should be transferred to Cambridge. Lockyer, therefore, moved to Sidmouth, where his second wife owned land and built his own observatory as a private venture on a hill top near the sea. Jack Wickens |
