An Account of the Revd. John Flamsteed, the First Astronomer-Royal; Compiled from His Own Manuscripts, and Other Authentic Documents, Never Before Published. to Which Is Added His British Catalogue of Stars, Cor. and Enl (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: were taken away from him, as soon as his patron, Sir Jonas Moore, died. (See page 45.) The textit{whole of the instruments were Flamsteed's own; the Government not having been at the expense even of textit{repairing them: and the textit{whole of the observations had been textit{reduced at Flamsteed's own charge (many ot them in duplicate) and arranged by him into catalogues and tables. Yet textit{(proh pudor /) in the latter portion of his life (as we shall presently see) the fruit of his long and laborious services was textit{forced from him, and treated as the property of Government: at his decease the instruments also were actually claimed by the Government as their own, and his executors were annoyed with a vexatious and troublesome law-suit on that account. (See pages 341 and 342.) As soon as Flamsteed had verified the position of his mural arc, he set about the determination of the equinox, of the latitude of his Observatory, of the obliquity of the ecliptic, and of other fundamental points for ascertaining the correct positions of the fixed stars, and the true solar, lunar, and planetary motions. His observation book, as published in the second volume of the textit{Historia Cceles- tis, and the Prolegomena in the third volume, show the manner and the order in which he pursued his inquiries, and will be a lasting monument of his zeal and perseverance in the cause of astronomy. Some of his methods are original; and continue in use even at the present day. The formation of a correct and enlarged catalogue of stars, at that time much wanted, and anxiously expected, was his first object; since no other valuable catalogue was then in existence except that of Tycho Brahe, containing the places of about 1000 stars, determined very roughly without the use of the telescope, which...