Abstract
Nowadays it is as an astronomer that Halley is best known. While still an undergraduate at Oxford, he travelled to St Helena and there observed the positions of the southern stars and compiled a catalogue of them similar to those Hevelius and Flamsteed were making of the northern stars. In the last decades of his long life, when he was now the second Astronomer Royal, he began and finished a series of observations of the Moon for a complete saronic cycle of eighteen years. In the middle years of his life he made those observations and calculations of comets that we shall shortly recall with the return of the comet bearing his name. To many of us his outstanding contributions to knowledge and natural philosophy lie in his instigating Newton to undertake the studies that led to the Principia and in ensuring that it was written and published.
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