William Rutter Dawes
| William Rutter Dawes | |
|---|---|
 William R. Dawes |
|
| Born | 19 March 1799 West Sussex |
| Died | 15 February 1868 (aged 68) |
| Citizenship | English |
| Fields | Astronomy |
| Notable awards | Gold Medal |
William Rutter Dawes (19 March 1799 – 15 February 1868) was an English astronomer.
Dawes was born in West Sussex, the son of William Dawes, also an astronomer, who travelled to the colony of New South Wales on the First Fleet in 1788.
Dawes was a clergyman who made extensive measurements of double stars as well as observations of planets. He was a friend of William Lassell. He was nicknamed "eagle eye". He set up his private observatory at his home in Haddenham, Buckinghamshire. One of his telescopes, an eight-inch refractor by Cooke, survives at the Cambridge Observatory where it is known as the Thorrowgood Telescope.
He made extensive drawings of Mars during its 1864 opposition. In 1867, Richard Anthony Proctor made a map of Mars based on these drawings.
He won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1855.
Craters on Mars and on the Moon are named after him, as is a gap within Saturn's C Ring.
An optical phenomenon, the Dawes limit, is named for him.
[edit] Selected writings
- Dawes, William Rutter (1849). The Stars in Six Maps, on the Gnomonic Projection. C. Knight.
[edit] Further reading
- Ashbrook, Joseph (1984). The Astronomical Scrapbook. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Sky Publishing. pp. 360–365. (Adapted from Sky & Telescope, July, 1973, page 27)
[edit] External links
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1855, 15, 148 - Awarding of RAS gold medal
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1869, 29, 116 - Obituary
- The Observatory, 1913, 36, 419 - Brief biography
