Stone, Edward

Born in Notting Hill , London, in the family of Edward and Sarah Stone. Having received his primary education at the School of the City of London , he entered the Royal College of London , and in 1856 received a scholarship to Queens College of Cambridge University, which he graduated in 1859 and was immediately elected a member of the college ^[2] .

In 1860, Stone replaced Rev. Robert Maine as the first assistant to the Greenwich Observatory , where he took up the fundamental task of clarifying the magnitude of astronomical constants, in particular, the average parallax of the Sun , which at that time was not accurately measured. Stone gained the value of solar parallax during the observations of Mars in 1860 and 1862. Later, he clarified his assessment by studying the observations of the passage of Venus through the solar disk of 1769. Stone also measured lunar parallax , determined the mass of the moon, and obtained a value for the nutation constant. In 1868, he was elected a member of the Royal Society of London. ^[3]

In 1869, Stone was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society , and after the resignation of Sir Thomas Macleer in 1870, he was appointed astronomer at Cape of Good Hope . Having occupied this position, Stone studied and published a large volume of observations left by his predecessor, of which (from 1856–1860) he compiled a catalog of 1,159 stars. But his main work was a catalog of 12,441 stars up to the 7th magnitude located between the South Pole and 25 ° S. sh., which was almost completed by the end of 1878 and published in 1881.

After the death of Robert Maine in 1878, Stone was appointed his successor to the post of "observer" (actually director) of the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford, and left Cape of Good Hope on May 27, 1879. At Oxford, he continued compiling a catalog of stars up to the 7th magnitude, including stars located 25 ° S. w. to the equator, and published the results in the Radcliffe catalog of 1890, which contains the location of 6,424 stars.

Stone on the Cape of Good Hope observed the passage of Venus through the disk of the Sun in 1874 and organized an expedition to observe the passage of Venus in 1882. He was president of the Royal Astronomical Society (1882–1884), and the first to recognize the importance of astronomical observations made at the Radcliffe Hornsby Observatory, and . Stone successfully observed a total solar eclipse on August 8, 1896 on Novaya Zemlya and planned a trip to India to observe the solar eclipse of 1898, but died in Oxford in May 1897. The number of published works of Stone on astronomy exceeds 150, the main of which are considered two star catalogs - the catalog of 1880 and 1890.

He was married to Grace Tuckett, they had at least four children.

• Works by or about Edward James Stone at Internet Archive
• Edward Stone from 1850 to 1910 @ Astrophysics Data System