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Astronomer: Stars
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Sir William Huggins (February 7, 1824-May 12, 1910) was an amateur English astronomer who was the first person to use spectroscopy to determine the compositions of astronomical objects (in 1861). He determined that the Sun and the stars are composed mostly of the element hydrogen. He ... examined the spectra of nebulae and comets. Huggins' wife (they were married in 1875), Margaret Lindsay Murray Huggins (1848-1915), was a self-taught astronomer who did extensive work in spectroscopy and photography. Margaret studied the Orion Nebula extensively. William and Margaret were the first people to realize that some nebulae, like the Orion Nebula, consisted of amorphous gases (and were not a congregation of stars, like the nebula Andromeda).
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Any experienced amateur astronomer will tell you that most observing is performed using low magnification. For small telescopes, low magnification (or "power") means anywhere from about 20x to about 50x. High power is useful (and often necessary) for viewing planets and double stars. However, initially finding a planet (or any object) is much easier with low power. Even users of large telescopes use mostly low power. The most magnification that is useful in a typical small telescope is in the range of 100x to 200x (for 'scopes in the 6" range).
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Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943- ) is an astronomer who discovered the existence of pulsars in 1967, while she was a graduate student at Cambridge University. A pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star that emits energy in pulses. Bell's graduate advisor (Anthony Hewish) was given a share of the 1974 Nobel Prize, but Bell was ignored. No one had any idea what these unusual objects were at the time, so the name little green men (LGM) was used. Soon, Thomas Gold suggested that pulsars were rapidly-spinning neutron stars, the remnants of a supernova.
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A[N] astronomer who brought the gift of the stars to everyone, Helen Sawyer Hogg led a life of remarkable achievement. She is well known for her research on variable stars in globular clusters, but she is perhaps best remembered for her astronomy column, which ran in the Toronto Star from 1951 to 1981. Helen wanted everyone to find the same joy in the stars that she did. She encouraged women to enter science, and her students remember her for her enthusiasm and warmth.
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A Chinese astronomer and Buddhist monk of the Tang dynasty, Zhang Sui (683-727), was the first to describe proper stellar motion, or the apparent motion of stars across the plane of the sky relative to more distant stars. In Western astronomy, Edmond Halley is credited with this discovery in 1718 for some stars from Ptolemy's catalogue.
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"The irregular shape of the disk is the clue that it is likely to contain planets," says astronomer Mark Wyatt, author of the study. "Although we can't directly observe the planets, they have created clumps in the disk of dust around the star."
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