David Stanley Evans

David Stanley Evans ( born January 28, 1916 in Cardiff, Wales, † November 14, 2004 in Austin, Texas ) was a British astronomer who was known by the fact that he used lunar occultations to determine angular diameters of stars in the 1950s.

Life

Evans went to Cardiff High School for Boys. He graduated from Part 2 of the Mathematics Tripos at King's College (Cambridge) in 1936 with First Class and 1937 the third part. In 1937 he was Ph.D. student at Cambridge Observatory, where he was also a student of Sir Arthur Eddington. The Ph. D. himself he received in 1941 for the work " The Formation of the Balmer Series of Hydrogen in Stellar Atmospheres ". During World War II he worked in Oxford together with the physicist Kurt Mendelssohn to medical problems in connection with the war. During this time, he was a scientific editor of Discovery and editor of The Observatory.

Evans left England in 1946 to the Radcliffe Observatory in Pretoria, South Africa to work. At that time, the position determination and photometry was the main interests of the astronomical world. Together with Harold Knox - Shaw, he determined the diameter of Antares and also came to the false statement that Arcturus is elliptical. This was later identified as an optical error. Evans was chief assistant at the Royal Observatory in Cape Town.

David was the second son of Arthur Cyril Evans and Kate Priest. He was married to Betty Evans Hall and adopted two sons: Jonathan Evans from Nashville, Tennessee, and Barnaby Evans from Austin, Texas. He had six grandchildren, three in Nashville and three in Austin.

• David Stanley Evans: Astronomy (Teach Yourself). Teach Yourself Books, London, 1975, ISBN 0-340-15248-6.
• David Stanley Evans: The Eddington Enigma. Xlibris Corporation, Princeton / NJ 1998, ISBN 0-7388-0131-3.
• John Herschel, Terence J. Deeming, David S. Evans: Herschel at the Cape. Diaries and correspondence of Sir John Herschel from 1834 to 1838. University of Texas Press, Austin, 1969, ISBN 0-292-78387-6.