Halley

(Edmund), eminent English astronomer, known in his lifetime as “the Infidel Mathematician,” b. Hagg erst on, London, 29 Oct. 1656; educated at Oxford. At twenty he had made observations of the planets and of the spots on the sun. In Nov. ’76 he went to St. Helena where he prepared his Catalogue of Southern Stars , ’79. He also found how to take the sun’s parallax by means of the transits of Mercury or Venus. In ’78 he was elected a F.R.S. Two years later he made observation on “Halley’s comet,” and in ’83 published his theory of the variation of the magnet. He became a friend of Sir Isaac Newton, whom he persuaded to publish his Principia . In ’98 he commanded a scientific expedition to the South Atlantic. In 1713 he was made sec. of the Royal Society and in 1720 Astronomer-royal. He then undertook a task which required nineteen years to perform, viz: to observe the moon throughout an entire revolution of her nodes. He lived to finish this task. Died 14 Jan. 1742. Halley was the first who conceived that fixed stars had a proper motion in space. Chalmers in his Biographical Dictionary says, “It must be deeply regretted that he cannot be numbered with those illustrious characters who thought it not beneath them to be Christians.”