Born London, England, 28 February 1831
Died Oxford, England, 9 May 1897
Edward Stone served as Her Majesty’s Astronomer at the Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope (1870–1879), where he compiled data on more than 12,000 stars for the Cape Catalogue. Stone was the son of Edward Stone, a London businessman. Educated at home until the age of 20, he first attended King’s College, London, but then transferred to Queen’s College, Cambridge, from which he graduated as fifth wrangler in 1859. Stone was subsequently offered a fellowship from the college.
In 1860, Stone succeeded Reverend Robert Main as chief assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Over the coming decade, he accomplished a number of duties under director George Airy . One of his principal investigations concerned a reanalysis of data from the 1769 transit of Venus, with a view of deriving the most accurate value of the solar parallax (giving the Earth’s true distance from the Sun). For this work, Stone was awarded the Gold...
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Anon. (1897). “Edward James Stone, Radcliffe Observer.” Astronomische Nachrichten 143: 295–296.
E. D. (1898). “Edward James Stone.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 58: 143–151.
Stone, Edward James (1881). Catalogue of 12,441 stars, for the Epoch 1880; from Observations Made at the Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope, during the Years 1871 to 1879. London: G. E. Eyre and W. Spottiswoode.
— (1894). Catalogue of 6424 Stars for the Epoch 1890. Formed from Observations Made at the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford, during the Years 1880–1893. Oxford: J. Parker.
Turner, Herbert Hall (1897). “Edward James Stone.” Observatory 20: 234–237.
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Marché, J.D. (2014). Stone, Edward James. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_1325
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