Edmond halley family

Edmund Halley  ©Halley was an English astronomer and mathematician who was the first to calculate the orbit of the comet later named after him.

Edmond (sometimes Edmund) Halley was born on 8 November on the eastern edge of London. While at Oxford University, Halley was introduced to John Flamsteed, the astronomer royal.

Influenced by Flamsteed's project to compile a catalogue of northern stars, Halley proposed to do the same for the Southern Hemisphere. To this end in he travelled to the South Atlantic island of St Helena. By the time he returned home in January he had recorded the celestial longitudes and latitudes of stars and observed a transit of Mercury across the Sun's disk.

Halley's star catalogue of was the first to contain telescopically determined locations of southern stars and in the same year he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society.

Along with the inventor and microscopist Robert Hooke, Sir Christopher Wren and Sir Isaac Newton, Halley was trying to develop a mechanical explanation for planetary motion.

Although progress had been made, Hooke and Halley were not able to deduce a theoretical orbit that would match the observed planetary motions.

Edmond halley born and died London 45 2 , - This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Although Halley had been dead for fifteen years by , he achieved lasting fame when the comet was observed on 25 December very slightly later than Halley expected. Halley's work on these problems was disrupted during the following weeks by the difficulties surrounding his father's disappearance and death, but by August Halley was pursuing the problem further by visiting Newton in Cambridge.

However, Newton was already there. The orbit would be an ellipse, and Newton expanded his studies on celestial mechanics in his famous work of , 'Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica', which Halley had persuaded him to publish.

In , Halley was appointed Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford University, but continued his work in astronomy.

In , he published 'A Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets', in which he described the parabolic orbits of 24 comets that had been observed from to He showed that the three historic comets of , , and were so similar in characteristics that they must have been successive returns of the same object - now known as Halley's Comet - and accurately predicted its return in In , he devised a method for observing transits of Venus across the disk of the sun in order to determine accurately the distance of the Earth from the Sun.

In , Halley succeeded Flamsteed as astronomer royal at Greenwich, a position which he held until his death on 14 January