Full text: History of the Royal Astronomical Society

[830-40 
1830-40] ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY 57 
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and Remarks for the year 1822,* a perfect ephemeris except that it 
does not include the sun and the moon. As the object was merely 
to show what an ephemeris ought to contain, the design was taken 
from Schumacher’s Hulfstafeln for 1820 and 1821, and much of 
the contents are borrowed from various sources ; e.g ., the list of 
occultations from Zach’s Correspondence astronomique (computed 
for Florence), and the places of the planets from Schumacher’s 
Ephemerides. Shortly afterwards Baily followed this up by 
publishing Remarks on the present defective state of the “ Nautical 
Almanac N London, 1822, 72 pp. ; dated May 7. 
In this essay Baily first refers to some remarks he had made in 
the introduction to his recently published Tables, owing to some of 
these differing from those of a similar kind in the Nautical Almanac. 
These comments had called forth an anonymous “ Reply to Mr. 
Baily’s Remarks ” in the Journal of the Royal Institution .f 
Baily reprints the whole of this reply and then answers it point 
by point. He goes through the four foreign ephemerides and 
enumerates the articles in them which are not in the Nautical 
Almanac. These were but few and unimportant, so far as the 
Berlin Jahrbuch and the Connaissance des Temps went, but the 
case was very different with the Coimbra and Milan ephemerides, 
particularly with the former, which Baily pronounced, on the 
whole, the best pattern for a work of this kind. His preference of 
it seems to be mainly due to the innovation of all computations 
being made with reference to mean solar time instead of apparent 
time. The Milan ephemeris was specially praised for containing 
a list of the visible occultations of all stars whose places 
were given in any catalogue. Baily also pointed out that 
the Bureau des Longitudes, established in 1796, more than 
eighty years after the British one, did not contain any useless 
members, nor “ learned professors, who lived upwards of fifty 
miles from the place of meeting and consequently seldom attend 
the Board.” 
Simultaneously with Baily’s pamphlet appeared one by South : 
Practical Observations on the Nautical Almanac, 64 pp., dated 1822 
April 15. He laid particular stress on showing that the Nautical 
Almanac had always contained information which was only of 
use to astronomers, and that there was therefore good reason for 
extending the items given. He compared observations of eclipses 
of Jupiter’s satellites by Beaufoy and himself with the Nautical 
Almanac and the Connaissance des Temps, and showed that the 
data in the latter agree very much better with the observations 
* 11 pp. Preface, xxx. pp. Explanation, 72 pp. Tables; chart of the 
Pleiades. 
f Obviously written by Young himself, as Baily also hints.
	        
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