Jubilee Number of The Observatory

Abstract

THE inception sixty years ago of a monthly magazine, The Observatory, familiar in its blue covers to astronomers the world over, is commemorated in a special number, No. 755, of April 1937. The magazine was founded in 1875 by Sir William Christie, who was then Astronomer Royal, and it has been carried on voluntarily ever since, without any monetary grants whatsoever towards its publication, by successive editors, mainly from the observatory staffs at Greenwich and at Cambridge. The present number includes three special articles. In the first, Sir Frank Dyson reviews “Sixty Years of Meridian Astronomy”; the second article is by Sir Arthur Eddington (himself one of the joint editors in 1913-19) who writes on “Interstellar Matter”; while the third is from a veteran contributor (editor, 1893-1912), Mr. H. P. Hollis, whose article deals with Airy's water telescope. A unique feature of the past which found an appreciative circle of readers was the monthly anonymous contributions “From An Oxford Notebook” by the late Prof. H. H. Turner; these notes ran without a break from 1894 until Turner's death in 1930. The current numbers of The Observatory carry on the useful work of providing a report of the discussions at the meetings of the Royal Astronomical Society (including Geophysical Discussions), in publishing articles by astronomers of international repute, and in airing views in the pages devoted to correspondence.