When this highly illustrated work first appeared in 1900, the
day-to-day business of an astronomer was prone to misapprehension;
the reality tended to be clouded by the temptation to imagine
observatories as preoccupied with making awe-inspiring discoveries
and glimpsing distant worlds. Describing himself as a hybrid
between an engineer and an accountant, astronomer Edward Walter
Maunder (1851 1928) explodes the romantic myths and takes the
reader on an entertaining tour of the history and real purposes of
the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Founded with the sole aim of
advancing navigation at sea, the observatory originally confined
its activities to the accurate compilation of celestial charts. In
exploring the observatory's various departments and the lives of
its Astronomers Royal, Maunder shows how its remit slowly expanded
into heliography, meteorology, spectroscopy and the study of
magnetism, which transformed it from a tool of the Navy to a major
institution in contemporary astronomy.
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