BAA Historical Section Meeting – Saturday November 27th, 2010
The Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge – "Twentieth-Century Astronomy"

On November 27th 2010, we held our first section meeting. We think it is probably the first ever Historical Section meeting!

The meeting had a theme of twentieth-century astronomy.

In the morning session there were two talks:

• Bob Marriott spoke about the life of Mary Evershed, the founder of the Historical Section and an eminent astronomer, author and historian in the early twentieth century.
• Jeremy Shears then described the life of Felix de Roy, a charismatic Belgian newspaper editor who was Director of the BAA Variable Star Section from 1922 to 1939. Tragically, his life was cut short as a consequence of food shortages in Nazi-occupied Belgium during the Second World War.

During the lunch break, Lee Macdonald gave a guided tour of the historic 12-inch Northumberland refractor at the Cambridge University observatory.

• Lee then gave the first formal talk of the afternoon session, on how the 98-inch Isaac Newton Telescope came to be built in the cloudy countryside of Sussex.
• Also in the afternoon session, Jay Tate described how a disused Schmidt telescope at Cambridge is being brought back to life at the Spaceguard Centre in the Welsh Marches in order to search for near-earth asteroids and comets.
• Jacqueline Mitton then presented a fascinating biography of Maria (pronounced Mar-EYE-ah) Mitchell, the earliest woman professional astronomer in the United States, who started a tradition of female professors of astronomy at Vassar College that continues to this day.
• Jacqueline's husband Simon Mitton rounded off the day with a talk on the life and work of Sir Fred Hoyle, the colourful and often controversial twentieth-century astronomer, who discovered how chemical elements are formed in stars, propounded the "steady state" theory of cosmology and founded what is now the Institute of Astronomy.

A fascinating display of papers and photographs from the Hoyle Project was brought to the meeting by Katie Birkwood of St John's College, Cambridge, of which Hoyle was a Fellow.

We had a display stand for the BAA; plus poster displays for the Society for the History of Astronomy and on "The Great Melbourne Telescope and Observational Astronomy", "The 'Catts Telescope': A Forgotten Nineteenth Century 20-inch Grubb Refractor" and "Ronald McIntosh and the Role of the Amateur in New Zealand Amateur Astronomy" contributed by Wayne Orchiston from James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland.