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Astronomer: Lowell Observatory
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From that time until 1972 the Astronomer Royal was Director of the Royal Observatory Greenwich. As Astronomer Royal he receives a stipend of £100 a year and is a member of the Royal Household, under the general authority of the Lord Chamberlain. After the separation of the two offices the position of Astronomer Royal has been largely honorary, though he remains available to advise the Sovereign on astronomical and related scientific matters, and the office is of great prestige.
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Boston Globe, 7/26/99 p.C2 -- Recently, an astronomer at the Lick Observatory in California found in the institution's library a horoscope cast by the 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler for an Austrian nobleman, Hans Hannibal Huetter von Huetterhofen. The document had been purchased in Russia in 1886 by the first director of the Lick Observatory and had lain forgotten for a century. Present-day astrologers always drag out poor Kepler in support of their bogus craft. See, they say, even such an eminent scientist as Kepler was a believer. Kepler practiced astrology only as a matter of financial necessity. His heart certainly wasn't in it. He wrote: "A mind accustomed to mathematical deduction, when confronted with the faulty foundations [of astrology], resists a long, long time, like an obstinate mule, until compelled by beating and curses to put its foot into that dirty puddle." Kepler's distrust of the "dirty puddle" hasn't rubbed off on Americans.
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Percival Lowell (1855-1916) was an American astronomer who founded the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona in 1894. Lowell studied Mars extensively, especially its surface markings, which he thought were canals. He ... thought that the bright areas were deserts and the dark ones were areas containing vegetation (this was not true). Lowell published three books on Mars: Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars As the Abode of Life (1908). Lowell also calculated that an unknown planet, dubbed Planet X, must orbit beyond Neptune. Percival Lowell calculated the rough location of Planet "X's" orbit, but died in 1916, before it was found.
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An honorary title held by a prominent British astronomer, created in 1675 by King Charles II when the Royal Greenwich Observatory was founded. Before 1971, the Astronomer Royal was ... director of the Royal Observatory, but after that year these became separate appointments. The title of Astronomer Royal for Scotland was created in 1834 and held by the director of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, until 1995 when the appointments were separated.
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Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941) was an American astronomer who cataloged 225,300 stars in the HD (Henry Draper) catalog; every star is classified by its stellar spectra. Cannon and Edward C. Pickering (director of the Harvard Observatory) published the original HD catalog (9 volumes) from 1918 to 1924. The catalog was later expanded by Cannon and Margaret W. Mayall in 1949.
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Contrary to the classical image of an astronomer peering through a telescope through the dark hours of the night, it is very rare for a modern professional astronomer to use an eyepiece on a larger telescope. It is far more common to use a charge-coupled device camera to record a long, deep exposure, allowing a more sensitive image to be created because the light is added over time. Before CCDs, photographic plates were a common method of observation. Modern astronomers spend relatively little time at telescopes - most spend a few weeks per year observing, and the rest of their time reducing the data (changing it from raw data to processed images) and analyzing it. Many astronomers work entirely from astronomical survey or space observatory data. Others work with radio telescopes like the Very Large Array, which is entirely automated, although it is maintained by telescope operators.
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