BornCape Town, South Africa, 8 August 1903
DiedCape Town, South Africa, 11 May 2001
Throughout his astronomical career, Alan Cousins showed an almost obsessive interest in stellar photometry, and specifically in the photometry of standard stars.
Cousins’s father, who emigrated from Britain to South Africa, became a senior civil servant, at one time Secretary of Labour. His mother was a daughter of Sir James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. Cousins was the eldest of four children and moved to Pretoria with his family where he completed his later schooling. At the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Cousins studied mechanical and electrical engineering and graduated with a B.Sc. in 1925, being awarded the vice chancellor’s prize for best student. In 1938, he married Alison Mavis Donaldson, and they had two children.
Cousins worked for some 20 years in the electrical utility industry, during which time he made numerous observations of variable stars. He...
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Selected References
Cousins, A. W. J. (1971). Photometric Standard Stars. Royal Observatory Annals No. 7.
— (1976). “VRI Standards in the E Regions.” Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society 81: 25–36.
Cousins, A. W. J. and R. H. Stoy (1962). “Standard Magnitudes in the E Regions.” Royal Observatory Bulletin No. 49.
Glass, I. S. (2001). “Alan Cousins 1903–2001.” Monthly Notes of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa 60: 67–87.
Hearnshaw, J. B. (1996). The Measurement of Starlight:Two Centuries of Astronomical Photometry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, esp. pp. 442–444, 446–447.
Williams, Thomas R. and M. Danie Overbeek (2001). “The End of an Era: A. W. J. Cousins 1903–2001.” Journal of the American Association of Variable Star Observers 30, no. 1: 58–61.
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Menzies, J. (2014). Cousins, Alan William James. In: Hockey, T., et al. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9917-7_9041
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