William Herschel Society lecture by Dr Lee Macdonald on Thursday 1 February 2018 @ 7.30 pm in BRLSI. He is the Research Facilitator at the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford.
Summary:
Originally built in 1769 to enable King George III to observe that year’s transit of Venus, Kew Observatory became one of the most important scientific institutions in nineteenth-century Britain. Dr Lee Macdonald will explore how a group of astronomers and science devotees – notable among them Sir John Herschel (1792-1871) used Kew Observatory as a site for the world’s first systematic programme of daily solar photography in tandem with observations of the Earth’s magnetic field. The work was a precursor of the ground- and space-based solar imaging and space weather monitoring that we take for granted today.