Norman Lockyer
Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer ( born May 17, 1836 in Rugby, Warwickshire, † August 16 1920 in Salcombe Regis, Devonshire ) was an English astronomer and is considered one of the pioneers of modern astrophysics and founder of archaeoastronomy.
Life
Joseph Norman Lockyer in 1857 an official in the British War Office. According to a publication for Mars topography he was in 1862 a member of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 1866 he made a spectral analysis of sunspots. In 1868, he discovered independently by the Frenchman Jules Janssen an unknown line in the solar spectrum. The corresponding new element was named helium.
1869, Lockyer the scientific journal Nature, which exists to this day. Lockyer was for 50 years editor. He was in 1870 appointed secretary of the Royal Commission on scientific instruction and the advancement of science and undertook an eclipse expedition to Sicily. 1871 he was appointed assistant commissioner. In the same year Lockyer traveled to a solar eclipse expedition to India.
In 1881 Lockyer Professor of Astronomy at the " Royal College of Science" ( now part of Imperial College). He traveled to Africa in 1882 to further eclipse expedition. He became in 1885 director of the newly founded Solar Observatory in South Kensington, which he remained until 1913. In 1912, he also founded a private observatory in Salcombe Hill in Sidcombe in Devon. Lockyer applied in 1887 to the Doppler effect to determine the rotation period of the Sun and created a theory of stellar evolution. He became in 1892 Vice President of the Royal Society.
He is known as one of the earliest representatives of archaeoastronomy. After he noticed the east-west orientation of many temples on a trip to Greece in 1890, he checked the astronomical alignment systematically in Egypt and found eg at the Temple of Amun at Karnak an orientation to the sunrise at midsummer day. Other alignments he found the star Sirius in Egypt. Lockyer published his observations in 1894 in his book The Dawn of Astronomy. In 1901 he determined the age of Stonehenge to the year 1680 BC He assumed that was the so-called Heel Stone aligned to the sunrise on Midsummer Day, and calculated the shift of the sunrise direction due to the precession of Earth's axis. An age of around 1800 BC in 1952 confirmed by the radiocarbon method. But he held Stonehenge not a " calculating machine " or a system for the determination of calendar dates such later Gerald Hawkins in the 1960s, but believed that it was a temple to celebrate the Celtic festival of May.
The lunar crater Lockyer and Lockyer Mars crater named after him.
Works (selection)
- Elementary lessons in astronomy. London ( 1868)
- Spectrum analysis as Applied to the sun. (1872 )
- The spectroscope and its applications. (1873 )
- Why the earths chemistry is as it is. (1877 )
- Report to the committee on solar physics on the basic lines common to spots and protuberances. (1880 )
- Meteoric hypothesis. (1890)
- Rules of golf. (1896 )
- Total eclipse of the sun, May 28, 1900. (1902 )