John Reynolds (astronomer)
John Henry Reynolds (1874-1949) was a British astronomer who served as the president of the Royal Astronomical Society between 1935 and 1937 and is known for his work on the classification of stellar bodies. [1] An amateur, he was the son of Alfred John Reynolds, the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, who owned a company which cut nails.[2][3] In 1899, at age 25, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 1907, he financed the construction of a 30-inch reflecting telescope in Helwan, Egypt, the first large telescope to study objects in the such southerly skies. He also hand-constructed a 28-inch telescope in Harborne.[4] Images from the Reynolds telescope was later used by Gérard de Vaucouleurs in his system of classifying galaxies. Reynolds also published his own galaxy classification for spiral galaxies in 1920. Edwin Hubble frequently corresponded with Reynolds, and some of his findings into the classification of stellar bodies seems at least inspired by his work.[5] The Hubble-Reynolds Law, a formula for measuring the surface brightness of elliptical galaxies, is named after them.
References
- ^ "Past RAS Presidents". Royal Astronomical Society. Retrieved 30 January 2011.
- ^ "Local History" (PDF). Mayors of Birmingham 1838-1895. Lord Mayors 1896-1975. Newman University College. Retrieved 30 January 2011.
- ^ David Block, Ken Freeman (2008). Shrouds of the night: masks of the Milky Way and our awesome new view of galaxies. Springer Science+Business Media. p. 185. ISBN 9780387789743.
- ^ Ibid., 187
- ^ Ibid., 211