Benjamin Apthorp Gould

Benjamin Apthorp Gould

Benjamin Apthorp Gould (September 27 1824 – November 26 1896) was a pioneering American astronomer. He is notable for creating the Astronomical Journal, discovering the Gould Belt, and for founding of the Argentine National Observatory and the Argentine National Weather Service.

He was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Having graduated at Harvard College in 1844, he studied mathematics and astronomy under C. F. Gauss at Göttingen, Germany, during which time he published approximately 20 papers on the observation and motion of comets and asteroids. Following completion of his Ph.D. (he was the first American to receive this degree in astronomy) he toured European observatories asking for advice on what could be done to further astronomy as a professional science in the U.S.A. The main advice he received was to start a professional journal modelled after the then world's leading astronomical publication, the Astronomische Nachrichten.

He returned to America in 1848. From 1852 to 1867 he was in charge of the longitude department of the United States Coast Survey. He developed and organized the service, was one of the first to determine longitudes by telegraphic means, and employed the Atlantic cable in 1866 to establish accurate longitude-relations between Europe and America.

Returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts and started the Astronomical Journal in 1849, which he published until 1861. He resumed publication in 1885. It is still published today. From 1855 to 1859 he acted as director of the Dudley Observatory at Albany, New York, and published in 1859 a discussion of the places and proper motions of circumpolar stars to be used as standards by the United States Coast Survey. In 1861 he undertook the enormous task of preparing for publication the records of astronomical observations made at the U.S. Naval Observatory since 1850. Appointed in 1862 actuary to the United States Sanitary Commission, he issued in 1869 an important volume of Military and Anthropological Statistics. He fitted up in 1864 a private observatory at Cambridge, Massachusetts and undertook in 1868, on behalf of the Argentine republic, to organize a national observatory at Córdoba. In 1868 he became the first director of the Argentine National Observatory (today, Observatorio Astronómico de Córdoba). While there, he extensively mapped the southern hemisphere skies using newly developed photometric methods. The need of astronomers for good weather prediction spurred Gould to collaborate with Argentine colleagues to develop the Argentine National Weather Service, the first in South America. Starting in 1870, with four assistants he mapped the stars of the southern skies there, using the recently developed photometric method, and completed in 1874 his greatest work, the Uranometria Argentina (published 1879) for which he received in 1883 the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. On June 1 1884, he made the last definite sighting of the Great Comet of 1882.

This was followed by a zone-catalogue of 73,160 stars (1884), and a general catalogue (1885) compiled from meridian observations of 32,448 stars. Gould's measurements of L. M. Rutherfurd's photographs of the Pleiades in 1866 entitle him to rank as a pioneer in the use of the camera as an instrument of precision; and he secured at Cordoba 1400 negatives of southern star clusters, the reduction of which occupied the closing years of his life. He remained in Argentina until 1885, when he returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1883 and the James Craig Watson Medal in 1887. Astronomers continue to investigate the astrophysics of a large scale feature of the Milky Way to which he called their attention in 1877, and honor him with its name, Gould's Belt. A crater on the Moon is named after him. He died at Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1896.

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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